The Reinterpretation of the
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1763-1789
*
The Reinterpretation of the
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1763-1789
Edited with an Introduction by
JACK P. GREENE
The Johns Hopkins University
HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDON
The Reintebfbetation of the Amebican Revolution: 1763-1789
Copyright © 1968 by Jack P. Greene
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this
hook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated,
49 East 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-23226
CONTENTS
Preface ix
I. INTRODUCTION
The Reappraisal of the American Revolution
in Recent Historical Literature 2
II. BACKGROUND
THE EXTERNAL RELATIONSHIP 76
# British Mercantilism and the Economic Development
of the Thirteen Colonies
Curtis P. Nettels 76
The Role of the Lower Houses of Assembly in
Eighteenth-Century Politics
Jack P. Greene 86
THE INTELLECTUAL FRAMEWORK 110
Two Conceptions of Empire
Richard Koebner 111
Democracy and the American Revolution: A Frame
of Reference
Richard Duel, Jr. 122
III. CHALLENGE FROM WITHOUT
FROM GRIEVANCES TO PRINCIPLES 150
Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power, 1764—1766
S Edmund S. Morgan 151
2 v hunt library
3 CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY
Vi CONTENTS
“Rights Imply Equality”: The Case Against Admiralty
Jurisdiction in America, 1764-1766
David S. Love joy 181
FROM ANXIETIES TO DISAFFECTION 207
The Logic of Rebellion
Bernard Bailyn 208
The Puritan Ethic and the Coming of the American
Revolution
Edmund S. Morgan 235
The Moral and Psychological Roots of American Resistance
Perry Miller 251
IV. TRANSFORMATION
THE REVOLUTION IN IDEALS 276
Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in
Eighteenth-Century America
Bernard Bailyn 277
Republicanism and Radicalism in the American Revolution:
An Old-Fashioned Interpretation
Cecelia M. Kenyon 291
THE REVOLUTION IN PRACTICE 321
Government by the People: The American Revolution and
the Democratization of the Legislatures
Jackson Turner Main 322
The American Revolution: The People As Constituent
Power
R. R. Palmer 338
V. BETWEEN FEAR AND HOPE
THE FORCES IN CONTENTION 364
The Anti-Federalists, 1781-1789
Fobbest McDonald 365
CONTENTS Vli
The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick 378
THE SPECTER OF FAILURE 396
Experience Must Be Our Only Guide: History, Democratic
Theory, and the United States Constitution
Douglass G. Adair 397
Shays's Rebellion: A Political Interpretation
J. R. Pole 416
VI. THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE
FROM PROBLEMS TO SOLUTIONS 436
The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action
John P. Roche 437
The Theory of Human Nature in the American Constitution
and the Method of Counterpoise
Arthur O. Lovejoy 469
That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science: David Hume,
James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist
Douglass G. Adair 487
THE NATURE OF THE DEBATE 504
Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the
Framers' Intents
Martin Diamond 504
Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the
Nature of Representative Government
Cecelia M. Kenyon 526
VII. ACHIEVEMENTS AND PERSPECTIVES
The American Revolution Considered As an Intellectual
Movement
Edmund S. Morgan 568
Vlii CONTENTS
Constitutio Lzbertatis
Hannah Abendt 579
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 611
Index 613
PREFACE
This anthology is intended to be neither comprehensive nor
representative of the vast body of literature on the era of the
American Revolution: it includes no statements of earlier inter¬
pretations and reflects my personal point of view at this time. What
it is intended to do is collect in one volume many of the more
significant shorter essays and portions of a few of the more impor¬
tant longer works published on the Revolution over the past two
decades. Although there are some glaring contradictions among
the individual selections, they capture, I think, something of the
thrust of recent Revolutionary scholarship and, when taken to¬
gether and read against the perspective provided by the introduc¬
tory essay, provide a coherent, if obviously incomplete, statement
of the nature and contemporary meaning of the Revolutionary
experience.
Jack P. Greene
Baltimore, Md.
lx
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The Reappraisal of the American
Revolution in Recent Historical Literature
Both because of its crucial position in modem history as the
first of the great revolutions and because it gave birth to the
United States of America, the American Revolution has always
exercised a powerful appeal for historians. Its causes and conse¬
quences, its nature and meaning have never ceased to fascinate
—and to puzzle—them, and each generation of historians has
approached it anew, seeking to understand it in terms that would
be meaningful to them. The result has been a welter of inter¬
pretations of why the Revolution occurred and what exactly it
was. Those interpretations can be explained partly by changing
intellectual styles, social, economic, and political imperatives, and
psychological currents in the public world and partly by shifting
conceptions of human nature and historical change within the
community of historians. But they also stand as dramatic testi¬
mony to the one indisputable truth about the event itself: the
American Revolution, like every other historical phenomenon of
comparable magnitude, was so complex and contained so many
diverse and seemingly contradictory currents that it can support
a wide variety of interpretations and may never be comprehended
in full. Yet, the extensive and intensive reappraisal of the Revo-
TMs essay is adapted from a pamphlet of the same title published as
Publication Number 68 (Washington, D.C.: Service Center for Teachers,
1967). Portions of it are derived from “The Flight from Determinism:
A Review of Recent Literature on the Coming of the American Revolution,”
South Atlantic Quarterly , LXI (Spring, 1962), 235-259 (reprint: Bobbs-
Merrill Co.), and “Changing Interpretations of Early American Politics,” in
The Reinterpretation of Early American History: Essays in Honor of John
Edwin Pomfret, ed. Ray A. Billington (San Marino, Calif.: 1966).
INTRODUCTION 3
lution that has occurred since World War II may have brought
us closer than ever before to such a comprehension.
Earlier Conceptions
The Whig Conception
Through most of the nineteenth century it was customary to
view the Revolution as a classic struggle for liberty. The most
celebrated, detailed, influential, and authoritative exposition of
this view came from George Bancroft, a fervid nationalist and
devoted democrat who had grown to manhood in the years of
intense national self-consciousness and democratic pride in Amer¬
ican institutions that followed the War of 1812. His monumental
History of the United States, 1 which brought the story of Ameri¬
can development through the formation of the Constitution, was
above all a patriotic ode to the foundation of American freedom.
Sharing the conventional nineteenth-century Whig and democratic
belief that the desire for freedom was the strongest drive in man,
he limned a vivid portrait of the colonists’ relentless striving for
freedom, from the first landing at Jamestown in 1607 to the final
victory at York town in 1781, against a background of more or
less continuous oppression from mother England. Although the
Revolution was occasioned by the tyrannical assaults of George
III upon American liberties in the 1760’s and 1770 s, it was
merely the logical culmination of a century and a half of struggle
against arbitrary English interference in American affairs.
For Bancroft, however, the final victory for freedom, the real
triumph of American democracy and the successful conclusion
of the Revolution, came not with the Treaty of Paris in 1783
but with the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. Immediately
after the war, during what John Fiske, one of Bancroft s younger
contemporaries, movingly described as The Critical Period, 2 petty
local jealousies, uncertainty, and political impotence almost
deprived Americans of the fruits of victory. Only with the em¬
bodiment of the libertarian and democratic principles of the
Revolution in the Constitution and the establishment of a strong
federal union were the achievements of 1776 and 1783 firmly
secured.
That Americans had been blessed with an environment peculi-
1 10 vols., Boston, 1834—1874.
2 Boston and New York, 1888.
4 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
arly well suited to the growth of freedom and, above all, with
the special favor of God, Bancroft had little doubt, and in his
conception of the Revolution as part of the "grand design of
Providence” he found its deepest meaning. Americans were God's
chosen people marked out for a special purpose, and their Revolu¬
tion was the necessary prelude to the "political regeneration” of
mankind, an important milestone on man’s inevitable march
toward a freer and more nearly perfect world.
Shared in large measure by such respected British contempo¬
raries as W. E. H. Lecky 3 and George Otto Trevelyan, 4 Bancroft’s
simple Whiggish view of the Revolution as well as his intense
patriotism did not set well with a new generation of American
historians who, trained in the methods of scientific history during
the closing decades of the nineteenth century, demanded a more
objective reading of the American past. After 1890 two new
tendencies in Revolutionary scholarship profoundly altered the
traditional interpretation.
The Imperial Conception
The first of these tendencies was manifest in the work of a
large group of historians who have since come to be referred
to as the imperial school. Deeply offended by Bancroft’s narrow
nationalism and thoroughly caught up in the general movement
toward Anglo-American accord that gained increasing vigor in
the decades immediately preceding World War I, these historians
insisted that the Revolution could be understood only when con¬
sidered in terms of the empire as a whole, that the imperial, as
well as the colonial, point of view had to be taken into account.
One of the most prominent of the imperial historians was
Herbert Levi Osgood. Though he himself never produced a major
work on the Revolution, he anticipated both the direction and
many of the conclusions of the imperial historians in a notable
essay published in 1898. 5 Calling for a "more just and scientific
view of the Revolution,” Osgood boldly suggested that the British
government not only was not "guilty of intentional tyranny
toward the colonies” but also had ample provocation for pursuing
the measures that led to revolution after 1763. From the per-
A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols., London and
New York, 1878-1890).
mte American Revolution (4 vols., London and New York, 1899-1913).
1898) 41^9 enCan Revolution ” Political Science Quarterly , XIII (March,
INTRODUCTION 5
spective of imperial officials in London, he argued, the vexatious
delays” that resulted from the “narrow, prejudiced and unstates¬
manlike” behavior of colonial lower houses of assembly during
the Seven Years’ War clearly justified the attempted reform of
colonial administration at the end of the war. Like Bancroft,
Osgood thought that the roots of the American Revolution were
deeply embedded in the colonial past, but unlike Bancroft he
expected to find them not in British oppression but in the social
and political tendencies . . . toward independence” within the
colonies. ,
George Louis Beer, a tobacco merchant turned scholar and a
protege of Osgood, was the first to amplify and work out the
implications of Osgood’s suggestions in a study of British Colonial
Policy, 1754-1765, which appeared in 1907. 6 As Beer carefully
pointed out, he wrote strictly within the framework of imperi
history, and his study made it clear that from the point of view
of British administrators at Whitehall, American conduct during
the Seven Years’ War was marked not only by extreme provincial¬
ism, as Osgood had suggested, but also by patent disloyalty.
Unmindful that the struggle extended beyond the narrow con¬
fines of the North American continent, Americans contmued to
trade with the French and Spanish in the West Indies throughout
the war. Such behavior understandably persuaded imperial om-
cials to try to tighten imperial ties and increase the administrative
efficiency of the empire when the war was over. But this move¬
ment for centralization unfortunately—unfortunately because Beer
tended to regard the Revolution as a tragic mistake, a “temporary
separation of two kindred peoples”—came into direct and violent
conflict with a movement for independence that dated from the
very foundation of the colonies. Previously restrained only by the
presence of the French and Spanish at the rear of the colonies
this movement could proceed without restraint after the removal
of the French and Spanish menace in 1763. For Beer, then, as
for Osgood and Bancroft, the ultimate cause of the Revolution
was the incipient and long-developing desire for independence
among the colonists.
The origin and nature of those desires were not spelled out in
any detail until the 1920’s when Charles McLean Andrews, the
most infl uential and productive of all the imperial historians,
turned after years of working on earlier colonial developments to
speculate about the origins of the Revolution in a brilliant series
“New York, 1907.
6 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of essays 7 and in his presidential address to the American His¬
torical Association in 1925. 8 Like both Osgood and Beer, Andrews
was strongly influenced by a conception of historical change that
stressed the overwhelming influence of the physical environment,
the evolutionary character of historical development, and a view
of human nature that saw man as the agent of vast, impersonal
forces largely beyond his control. The supreme challenge to his¬
torians, he indicated in his presidential address, was to discover
those many "deeplying and almost invisible factors and forces
which influence and often determine human action.” Revolutions,
he argued, were never sudden and never made by men; rather,
they were the products of complex long-range developments
which were the "masters, not the servants, of statesmen and
political agitators.” A sound explanation of the American Revolu¬
tion had therefore to be sought not in the behavior of individuals
or groups during the 1760’s and 1770’s but in the differing "states
of mind” produced by profoundly divergent conditions in the
colonies and Great Britain during the previous century and a
half. The American environment had given birth to "new wants,
new desires, and new points of view,” to a completely "new order
of society,” characterized by growth and change and contrasting
sharply with a way of life in Britain that seemed to Andrews to
have been "intellectually, socially, and institutionally in a state
of stable equilibrium.” Andrews was convinced that a collision
between two such disparate and incompatible "yokefellows,” the
one absolutely committed to keeping the colonies dependent and
the other demanding, through its ever maturing representative
assemblies, an ever increasing amount of self-government, was
inevitable.
The most notable contribution of these historians was a deeper
understanding of the imperial side of American development. No
one could read either the more substantial works of Osgood, Beer,
Andrews, and their contemporaries or important contributions
from the second generation of imperial historians—such as Leon-
axd Woods Labaree’s Royal Government in America? which sur¬
veyed in detail the political relations between the imperial gov-
emment and the colonies, and Lawrence A. Harper’s The English
Colonial Background of the American Revolution; Four Essays in Ameri¬
can Colonial History (New Haven, 1924).
Tlie Ame rican Revolution: An Interpretation,” American Historical
Remew , XXXI (January, 1926), 219-232.
•New Haven, 1930.
INTRODUCTION 7
Navigation Laws, 10 which described at length the rationale and
operation of the mercantile system—and still regard the British
as tyrants. By the late 1920’s, in fact, no serious student of early
American history could doubt that the British had, or at least
thought they had, good and substantial reasons for undertaking
the measures they did, however the colonists might have inter¬
preted them.
Perhaps because they were so thoroughly engrossed in explor¬
ing the nature of imperial administration during the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries and in putting colonial develop¬
ments into their proper imperial setting, none of the first genera¬
tion of imperial historians ever produced a systematic or detailed
treatment of the critical decades just before the Declaration of
Independence. That task was not undertaken until the 1930’s,
when Lawrence Henry Gipson, Andrews’ most prolific student’
began to publish a massive study. The British Empire Before the
American Revolution, which in the thirteen volumes thus far
published has carried the story from 1748 to 1776. From these
volumes as well as from two shorter studies 11 has emerged what
may be assumed to be the final version of the imperial interpre¬
tation of the origins of the American Revolution. In its broader
outlines it does not differ substantially from the more tentative
formulations of Beer and Andrews. Like Andrews, Gipson places
heavy emphasis upon the role of the American environment in
causing the colonists to develop ideals and interests that diverged
sharply from those of Englishmen. With Beer, he views the re¬
moval of the French menace as the decisive event in the coming
of the Revolution. Already “politically mature, prosperous, dy¬
namic, and self-reliant” by the 1750’s, Americans gained physical
security as well with the conquest of Canada; and when the
British government justifiably sought to exert stricter controls
over them in the 1760’s and 1770’s, nothing was left to deter
them from throwing off the burdensome responsibilities of mem¬
bership in the empire. By providing a solid substructure of de¬
tailed evidence to support these notions, Gipson is finally supply-
ing what Osgood had called for in 1898: a comprehensive study,
free from the patriotic distortions of the nineteenth-century
nationalists, that is seeking to account rationally and historically
30 New York, 1939.
n The Coming of the Revolution , 1763-1775 (New York, 1954) and “The
American Revolution as an Aftermath of the Great War for Empire, 1754-
1763,” Political Science Quarterly, LXV (March, 1950), 86-104.
8 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
for the conduct of the British government on the eve of the
American Revolution.
The Progressive Conception
At the very time Osgood and Beer were calling for a more
dispassionate analysis of the British side of the American Revo¬
lution, another group of historians was focusing its attention upon
internal divisions within the colonies. Where Bancroft had found
unanimity among the patriots, they found disagreement and
conflict. Where the imperial historians emphasized the political
and constitutional aspects of the controversy, they stressed the
social and economic. To a very large extent, their interpretations
were shaped by the rhetoric and assumptions of Progressive poli¬
tics and social thought and by a conception of revolution that
derived largely from the experience of the great European revo¬
lutions. Their sympathies, like those of all good Progressives, lay
with the little man—the yeoman farmer, agricultural tenant,
artisan, and town laborer. Not only the Revolutionary era, but
all of American history seemed to have been dominated by a
fundamental conflict between such groups, who stood for human
rights and democracy, and the upper classes, who advocated
property rights and the political predominance of special interest
groups. The American Revolution was thus thought to have ex¬
hibited patterns of class conflict and internal political and social
upheaval similar to those of the French Revolution; and it came
to be seen largely and most importantly as part of a sweeping
straggle for democracy on the part of disfranchised and unprivi-
eg groups, who by their constant pressures were slowly bring-
mg about that equality of condition that was characteristic of the
age o Andrew Jackson but had subsequently been undermined
an su verted by the machinations of selfish businessmen and
m T5f nrerS ^ the decades the Civil War. Also, like all
gmd Progressives, they automatically assumed that man was
? . . ^ ^ genomic creature and that economic interest largely
behavior and developments. Believing that
r r b0tl \ see their biterests clearly and perceive the best
skeBt!<-ai S If U ^ e tbei2 ?\ ” Q0St °f these historians were profoundly
of Sir a ” 7 simple reflections
f ” CeS " mMe abstractions designed to cloak
remain d selfish that they necessarily had to
the dominaTi^ti K ^ as * eir mission, therefore, to break down
the dominant political abstractions of the Revolution and, by
INTRODUCTION 9
“employing the ruthless methods of modem scholarship,” to ferret
out and expose the concrete interests and motives that lay behind
them, to discover, as it were, the “real” American Revolution.
Two early works, Charles H. Lincoln, The Revolutionary Move¬
ment in Pennsylvania, 1760—1776 (1901 ), 12 and Carl L. Becker,
History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-
1776 (1909), 13 provided the foundations for the Progressive in¬
terpretation of the Revolution. Lincoln and Becker found that the
Revolutionary controversy in both colonies was strongly condi¬
tioned by pre-existing conflicts within them. In Pennsylvania
there were “two opposing forces, one radical,” composed of Scotch-
Irish Presbyterians and Germans in the west and non-Quaker
lower- and middle-class Philadelphians in the east, and the other
“conservative,” consisting of the Quaker mercantile oligarchy in
the east. In New York the radical unprivileged and unfranchised
common freeholders, tenants, mechanics, and artisans were
aligned against a tightly-knit landowning and commercial aris¬
tocracy. In both colonies the conflicts between these groups and
the struggle of the radicals to push their way into the political
arena and to achieve a wider area of economic and social free¬
dom—the fight over “who should rule at home” and the radical
demands for the “democratization of . . . politics and society”—
and not the debate with Great Britain were most important in
shaping political developments in the years between 1763 and
1776. The aristocratic elements in both colonies took the lead in
opposing the Grenville program in 1764 and 1765, but they began
to draw back as it became increasingly clear over the next decade,
as Lincoln wrote, that “the arguments . . . used against English
misrule” could be “turned against minority control and misgovem-
ment” within the colonies. In the crucial years from 1773 to
1776 the extralegal committees, conventions, and congresses, not
the conservative-dominated and legitimate colonial legislatures,
were chiefly responsible for the achievement of independence, and
in the process they also effected—more thoroughly in Pennsyl¬
vania than in New York—the “internal revolution” for which they
had primarily been striving over the previous decade. The con¬
test with Britain, then, was chiefly important not because it
brought the colonies their independence but because it unleashed
the “latent opposition of motives and interests between the privi¬
leged and the unprivileged” and provided the opportunity for the
“PMLadelpMa, 1901.
“Madison, Wis., 1909.
IO REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
^ ^ eat ViCtory for Americ an democracy by
others^to rive tb^f privll ® g ® d to become loyalists and compelling
tion of pSlic affiSr 5 m ° CraCy a larg6r Share “ the direc -
and'ftoS^M 81111 ^! 7 b6tWeen deve l°Pments in Pennsylvania
for Y ° r \ strongl y nested that what was true
Sth B?taS h a ? ^ I 80 t ^ e for the others, that the debate
struggle for dpmrv™ 1 ^ 616 been accompanied by an internal
Privileged and nrivid a b ® tween ratJ icals and conservatives, un-
was gfven to ^? e§ed ’ dem ocrats and aristocrats. Added weight
Arlm MeiS til ' SUgges ? on “ 1918 with the publication of
S V 16 C ° l0nial Merchants and the
length that tbe l ^ t * ds volume Schlesinger argued at
patt^J hid^? 1148 “ ^ of the colonies exhibited a similar
KL comd° r i*™*? 1763 and 1776 ‘ Stron g!y opposed to
they spearheaddfh rest nctions introduced in 1763 and 1764,
shend AcJ ^, t against tbe Stamp and the Towm
Sua&n to bCgan t0 l0Se C0ntr 0l of the
first during thedts agltatars md the “proletarian element,”
enforcement of d? ° V ? ^ ? tamp Act and then during the
tharS? wl 0nUnp0 f ta ? 0n from !768 to 1770, they realized
like F^kenstein U Te? dably r f easin g disruptive forces which.
Thereafter the^ d-* 7 W6 f e ^dmg it impossible to control.”
intense oftShtHodt ” S ° Ught t0 m ° derate **
Tea Act of 1773 ra 5S S? BntlSh P ° Mcy ' 0nly when the
monopolies did the merchants aShf^ ° f par l iamentar y-gr an te d
the results thorouahlv ? « agam enc °urage a firm stand, and
seized the initiative ^mhS?? ^ earlier fears as ^ rad icals
pendence and to a more do Colonies down the road to inde-
with the unsatisfactorv _ 1 ' mocratlc Pobty, and left the merchants
or acquiescing in the MlitLca^f^ 68 ? eitber becomin g loyalists
In a briUialt ° f “ “ natural ” ****■
of his book, ScMesinger i us * the publication
standing of the comma of fh t? Implications, for an under-
recent works on the political oLf? 0l ? i0n ’ of hi® own an d other
foe colonies. In the^uoeess’ be ?’ a " d , economic divisions within
interpretation which for tbe’ re ? ted a general framework of
de ? ades determ ined the
The Revolution, he argued could nn^ Rev, ?luUonary controversy.
__ g ’ Could no longer be looked upon simply
“2« r York, 1918.
XXXIV (March^ 19i^ V 61-7R n Reconsidered >” Political Science Quarterly ,
INTRODUCTION II
as a ‘‘great forensic controversy over abstract governmental
rights.” At best, Schlesinger declared, the history of the consti¬
tutional defenses of the colonists was “an account of their retreat
from one strategic position to another,” and, in any case, the big
merchants (and presumably the planters)—the men who “domi¬
nated colonial opinion”—were, like all “practical men of affairs,
• * • con temp tuous, if not fearful, of disputes upon questions of
abstract right.” Rather, the Revolution had to be seen in the
context of the “clashing of economic interests and the interplay
of mutual prejudices, opposing ideas and personal antagonisms.”
In general, Schlesinger emphasized, those interests and prejudices,
those ideals and antagonisms, were determined by conflicting
economic interests within the empire and by sectional and class
considerations within the colonies. Hard economic interests—the
fear among the merchants in the middle and northern colonies of
the new commercial regulations and later of parliamentary-
granted monopolies and the desire among the southern plantation
aristocracy to repudiate their enormous debts—and not devotion
to constitutional principles per se drove the colonial upper classes
°PP° se the new colonial policy. Inside the colonies, there were
not thirteen units of population thinking alike on most public
questions,” but instead, he argued, in applying the frontier hy¬
pothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, two “major groupings” of
population—the eastern seaboard, divided into the commercial
North and the agricultural South, and the West—which were
differentiated by physiographical conditions, economic interests
and political ideals.” It was the union between the “interior democ¬
racies and the “democratic mechanic class” in the cities, a union
promoted by a new breed of professional revolutionaries epito¬
mized by Samuel Adams, that shaped the course of internal poli¬
tics between 1763 and 1776. “Fundamentally,” Schlesinger con¬
cluded, “the American Revolution represented the refusal of a
self-reliant people to permit their natural and normal energies to
be confined against their will, whether by an irresponsible imper-
ial government or by the ruling minorities in their midst.”
That the deep-seated economic forces and sectional and class
divisions in the pre-Revolutionary years emphasized by Lincoln,
Becker, and Schlesinger were, in fact, fundamental to early
American political life had been confirmed in 1913 by Charles
A. Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1Q
a study of the other end of the Revolutionary era and one of the
“New York, 1913.
12 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
half dozen most influential books ever written in American history.
Assuming that "real economic forces . . . condition great move¬
ments in politics,” Beard analyzed the economic interests of all
members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. A close exam¬
ination of a group of previously unused Treasury records revealed
that most members of the convention owned government securi¬
ties. Along with other evidence this discovery led him to conclude
that the Constitution "was not the product of an abstraction
known as ‘the whole people [as jurists were prone to argue]/ but
of a group of economic interests which must have expected bene¬
ficial results from its adoption.” Specifically, Beard argued, the
holders of personalty—personal property in money, manufactures,
trade and shipping, and especially public securities, which prom¬
ised to rise in value with the establishment of a stronger and
more effective central government—as opposed to real property
in land and slaves provided the "dynamic element in the move¬
ment for the new Constitution.” Welded together by economic
concerns that cut across state lines, a "small and active group
of men” with strong personalty interests and expectations of large
profits inaugurated the movement for the new Constitution, which
was written in secrecy by a convention which was with few
exceptions composed of men who were "immediately, directly, and
personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from,
the establishment of the new system.” Despite strong opposition
from small farming and debtor interests, the personalty interests
were able to push the Constitution through the ratifying conven¬
tions because a large majority of adult males did not vote either
because they were disfranchised or because they did not realize
what was happening. The Constitution thus became "essentially
an economic document” written by a group of self-interested men
to forward their own personal economic interests and to secure
the rights of property; it was, therefore, necessarily inimicable
to the interests of the vast bulk of Americans, who had either no
property or only small holdings. Implicit in Beard’s conclusions
was the idea that the Constitution, instead of being the logical
culmination of the Revolution, as Bancroft and Fiske had argued,
was actually a repudiation of it, a counterrevolutionary instru¬
ment conceived by conservatives to curb the democratic excesses
of the war and Confederation periods.
Around the theme of a deeply rooted and pervasive conflict
over democracy between rival groups of radicals and conservatives
representing fundamentally antagonistic sectional and class in¬
terests, Becker and Lincoln, Schlesinger and Beard had together
INTRODUCTION 13
built what appeared to be a coherent explanation of the entire
Revolutionary era. The pressures of 1774—1776 finally gave the
radicals the opportunity they had been waiting for to wrest the
lion s share of political power from the conservatives. Over the
next decade they pushed through the Declaration of Independ¬
ence and inaugurated a program of democratic reform that suc¬
ceeded in the various states according to the strength of radical
domination but was checked, if only temporarily, in 1787—1788
by the Constitution and the conservative resurgence it represented.
In 1926, J. Franklin Jameson added significantly to this inter¬
pretation with The American Revolution Considered as a Social
Movement , 17 a survey of the democratic achievements of the
radicals. Allan Nevins had described in detail some of these
achievements two years earlier in The American States During
and After the Revolution 18 but it was Jameson who fitted them
all together to support the thesis that the American Revolution,
like the French Revolution, was truly revolutionary In character
and profoundly altered many aspects of colonial society. ^The
stream of revolution,” he wrote in a now famous sentence, once
started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread
abroad upon the land.” The extension of the suffrage, abolition of
feudal holdovers such as quitrents, primogeniture, and entail,
redistribution of loyalist estates to small holders, disestablishment
of the Anglican church, abolition of slavery and the slave trade
in many states, and changes in the relation of social classes to
one another were all products of the democratic impulses set free
by the Revolution. Taken together they represented a significant
advance toward a ‘levelling democracy.”
Still other studies published in the 1920’s and 1930 s amplified
the Progressive interpretation of the coming of the Revolution in
significant ways. Two analyses of the arguments of the colonial
opposition between 1763 and 1776, Randolph G. Adams, The
Political Ideas of the American Revolution, 19 and Carl L. Becker,
The Declaration of Independence , 20 agreed, as Becker put it, that
the colonists had “step by step, from 1764 to 1776, . . • modified
their theory to suit their needs.” Denying only Parliament s right
to levy internal taxes at the time of the Stamp Act, they extended
their argument to include all taxes for revenue after Parliament
had humored them by levying external duties with the Town-
17 Prmceton, 1926.
“New York, 1924.
“Durham, N.C., 1922.
“New York, 1922.
fU ? 11
PST LIBRARY
14 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
shend Acts; and, after Parliament had threatened the internal
constitutions of the colonies by legislation as well as taxation with
the Coercive Acts of 1774, they denied that Parliament had any
authority over the colonies whatever. Neither Becker nor Adams
said as much, but their conclusions could be taken to indicate
that the colonies had no firm devotion to the constitutional argu¬
ments they employed, that, in fact, it was the economic motive,
the desire to escape any form of taxation, that lay behind their
behavior.
From this position it was only a short step to the idea that
the colonists had not taken seriously any of the ideas they spouted
in the vast flood of literature that poured from colonial presses
in the pre-Revolutionary debate. This was the clear inference of
two other studies, John C. Miller’s Sam Adams: Pioneer in Prop¬
aganda (1936), 21 and Philip Davidson’s Propaganda and the
American Revolution (1941), 22 both of which were written in the
dark days of the Great Depression when the Progressive view of
the American past had an especially powerful appeal and when
in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany the manipulation of large
segments of the population by clever propaganda made it easy to
see propaganda as a major element in American politics at virtu¬
ally every stage in the nation’s history. Both Miller and Davidson
recognized that propaganda might be true or false, sincere or
insincere, but they tended in general to treat it only as a mask
for deeper motives. The net results of their studies was to throw
still greater doubt upon the depth of the Americans’ commitment
to the ideas they advanced and, along with the works of Randolph
Adams and Becker, to contribute to the conception of the Revolu-
tion as a movement begun by a group of wealthy conservatives
for essentially economic motives and subsequently arrogated by
a small band of radical conspirators using the debate with Britain
to accomplish other, more important political, economic, and
social ends within the colonies.
By the early 1940’s the only parts of the Revolutionary era
that had not been thoroughly studied from the Progressive point
of view were the war and Confederation periods, the years be¬
tween the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the
Constitution. Two general surveys, Charles and Mary Beard’s The
Rise of American Civilization,^ a popular text, and Vernon Louis
Farrington s Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial
“Boston, 1936.
“Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941.
•2 vols.. New York, 1927.
INTRODUCTION 15
Mind, 24 the first of a dramatic three-volume account of the strug¬
gle between aristocratic and democratic forces in the American
past as expressed in intellectual life, had traced the conflicts of
the 1760’s and 1770's through the 1780’s and the debate over the
Constitution. Other studies had described the conflict in two
critical states: New York and Pennsylvania. 25 But it remained
for Merrill Jensen to present the first really comprehensive study
in The Articles of Confederation 26 and The New Nation 27 the
most important books written in the Progressive tradition on the
Revolutionary era, with the single exception of Beard’s great
work on the Constitution.
Jensen’s primary achievement was to demonstrate that the
Confederation period was not one of complete “stagnation, in¬
eptitude, bankruptcy, corruption, and disintegrationas Fiske
and others had suggested. The Confederation government, Jensen
showed, made significant accomplishments in the disposition of
western lands, and within its framework states and individuals
were able both to survive a postwar depression in the mid-1780’s
and to make a strong beginning toward solving the problems of
developing a foreign trade, paying off wartime debts, and paving
the way for smoother commercial intercourse among the states.
The Fiske view derived, Jensen argued, from the “uncritical ac¬
ceptance of the arguments of the victorious party in a long
political battle” over the nature of the central government, which
had been carried on from the outset of the Revolution by the
adherents of “two consistently opposed bodies of opinion” deriving
to some extent from differing material interests and representing
fundamental economic, social, and political divisions in American
society. The nationalists, composed largely of those members of
the colonial aristocracy who became patriots and new men who
gained economic power during the war, demanded a stronger
central government that could preserve them from the “horrors
of unchecked democracy” by suppressing internal rebellions, regu¬
lating trade, collecting taxes, and checking the “power of the
states and the democracy that found expression within their
24 New York, 1927. . , „ . .
^Most notably, E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period,
1783-1789 (New York, 1932); J. Paul Selsam, The Pennsylvania Consti¬
tution of 1775: A Study in Revolutionary Democracy (Philadelphia, 1936);
and Robert L. Brunhouse, The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776-
1790 (Harrisburg, 1942), all of which, it should be reiterated, dealt with
New York and Pennsylvania.
“Madison, Wis., 1940.
“New York, 1950.
l6 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
bounds.” On the other side were the true federalists, consisting
primarily of the prewar radicals described by earlier writers and
inaccurately labeled antifederalists. This group was generally
satisfied with the Articles, which by providing for decentralization
and states’ rights were the embodiment of the “agrarian democ¬
racy” for which they stood, the constitutional expression of the
philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, and the “natural
outcome of the revolutionary movement.” Having won their real
goal, local self-government, with the war, the radicals displayed
little interest in maintaining the organization they had created
to bring about the Revolution; as a result, they were caught off
guard by the dedicated, well disciplined efforts of the nationalists
to overturn the Articles and with them some of the major achieve¬
ments of the Revolution, and the nationalists were able in 1787
to engineer a “conservative counter-revolution” and erect a “na¬
tionalistic government whose purpose in part was to thwart the
will of ‘the people’ in whose name they acted.”
With the works of Jensen the Progressive conception of the
Revolutionary era achieved its fullest expression. It was a story
of internal revolution and counterrevolution, the rise and fall of
democratic radicalism. Everywhere in the years between 1765
and 1776 radical leaders “seized on British acts as heaven-sent
opportunities to attack the local aristocracy . . . under the guise
of a patriotic defense of American liberties” and united the masses
“in what became as much a war against the colonial aristocracy
as a war for independence.” It was the course of social revolution
within the colonies—which Jensen argued was often far more
important in determining political behavior than the more remote
dangers of British policy—and not the debate with Britain which
thus came to receive primary emphasis. The Revolution was to be
viewed as “essentially, though relatively, a democratic movement
within the thirteen American colonies,” and its significance lay
in its “tendency to elevate the political and economic status of
the majority of the people.” With the Constitution the movement
was temporarily reversed, but all was not lost, because the na¬
tionalists—the aristocratic enemies of democracy—had failed to
reckon with the possibility “that the government they created
might be captured by the radicals united on a national scale.”
By calling attention to the importance of internal divisions, the
Progressive historians added a new dimension to the study of the
Revolution; more importantly, for over four decades they supplied
most of the leading ideas and intellectual energy in Revolutionary
scholarship. They had never won the complete endorsement of
INTRODUCTION 17
all of the specialists who wrote about the Revolution, and most
of the standard narrative accounts continued to treat it as a strug¬
gle for liberty, albeit in much more moderate tones than Bancroft
and with a heavy imperial and Progressive veneer. 28 Among the
vast body of American historians, however, and especially among
the writers of the most widely-used American history texts, the
Progressive interpretation by the late 1930’s had become the
standard version of the Revolutionary experience.
New Directions
Since World War II a new group of scholars has subjected the
writings of the imperial and Progressive historians to a massive,
critical reassessment. Reexamining and rethinking the evidence
at almost every major point, they have proceeded along two dis¬
tinct yet complementary and overlapping lines of investigation.
One line has been concerned mainly with exploring the substan¬
tive issues both in the debate with Britain and in the politics of
the new nation between 1776 and 1789 and in examining the
nature of internal political divisions and assessing their relation¬
ship to the dominant issues. A second line of investigation has
been through the history of ideas, especially through the under¬
lying assumptions and traditions of social and political behavior,
and has sought to explain the relationship between those ideas
and the central developments of the Revolutionary era.
Each line of investigation rests upon a conception of human
nature that contrasts sharply with older interpretations. For the
new group of scholars man is no longer simply a pawn at the
mercy of powerful incomprehensible forces entirely beyond his
2S This statement refers especially to Claude H. Van Tyne, The Causes of
the War of Independence (Boston and New York, 1922), and The War
for Independence (Boston and New York, 1929); H. E. Egerton, The Causes
and Character of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1923); and John C.
Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943), and The Tri¬
umph of Freedom, 1775-1783 (Boston, 1948). The statement is even more
applicable to the several important studies of constitutional and political
thought published between 1920 and 1940: Charles Howard Mcllwain,
The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (New York,
1923); Robert Livingston Schuyler, Parliament and the British Empire
(New York, 1929); Benjamin F. Wright, Jr., American Interpretations of
Natural Law (Cambridge, 1931); Andrew C. McLaughlin, Foundations of
American Constitutionalism (New York, 1932, and A Constitutional History
of the United States (New York: 1935); Charles F. Mullett, Fundamental
Law and the American Revolution, 1760—1776 (New York, 1933, 1966);
and Edmund Cody Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York, 1941).
l8 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
control, as lie was for both the nineteenth-century nationalists and
the imperial historians. Nor is he a creature so strictly devoted
to the pursuit of his own self-interest and so extraordinarily
prescient as to be able to calculate ends and means, as he so
often appeared in the writings of the Progressives. Instead, he is
an extraordinarily limited and insecure being, tenaciously at¬
tached to what he conceives to be his own interests and, often
more importantly, to those principles, values, institutions, and
aspirations around which he has built his life, and he responds
intensely and emotionally to every contingency that seems to
threaten any portion of his existence—his ideals as well as his
interests. Man’s limitations necessarily mean that his perceptions
of the threat will rarely be accurate (indeed, he will probably
see threats that do not exist), that he will be perpetually subject
to self-delusion so that even his understanding of his own be¬
havior will be distorted, and that he will rarely be able to foresee
the results of his actions, though he will often try to do so. In
short, he is a creature who, as A. O. Lovejoy has put it, “is for¬
ever Nationalizing’ but . . . is scarcely ever rational,” a being who
is at once at the mercy of history—of the larger developments
within his lifetime—and, within the limits imposed by his nature
and the physical and cultural environment in which he lives, free
to make choices and take actions—perhaps even great creative
and selfless actions—which impinge upon and perhaps even alter
in significant ways the course of history. To understand the
historical process, then, the new group of scholars assumes, one
must understand the nature of broad historical forces, the be¬
havior of individuals and groups, and the interaction between
historical forces and human behavior. To understand human
behavior, moreover, one must understand man’s explanations of
his own actions because, no matter how grossly distorted those
explanations may be, man does act upon them and they become,
therefore, powerful causative forces.
The new investigations have focused upon seven major prob-
lems: 1) the nature of the relationship between Britain and the
colonies prior to 1763; 2) the nature of social and political life
within the colonies and its relationship to the coming of the
Revolution; 3) the reasons for the estrangement of the colonies
from Britain between 1763 and 1776; 4) the explanations for
the behavior of the British government and its supporters in the
colonies between 1763 and the loss of the colonies in 1783; 5)
the revolutionary consequences of the Revolution; 6) the charac¬
ter of the movement for the Constitution of 1787 and its relation-
INTRODUCTION ig
ship to the Revolution; and 7) the nature and meaning of the
Revolution to the men who lived through it.
Relationships Prior to 1763
In the evaluation of the causes of the Revolution, one of the
central problems has been the character of the relationship be¬
tween Great Britain and the colonies prior to 1763. Most earlier
interpretations viewed that relationship as essentially an unhappy
one for the colonists, who, it was suggested, deeply resented the
navigation system and chafed under the political restrictions
imposed upon them by the home government. This view, which
was widely held in Britain and among British officials in the
colonies during the eighteenth century, has been sharply chal¬
lenged by several of the newer investigations. In The Navigation
Acts and the American Revolution^ Oliver M. Dickerson exam¬
ined the navigation system as it operated in the eighteenth cen¬
tury and concluded that it did not work serious hardships upon
the colonies. This view was similar to the interpretations of earlier
imperial historians, especially George L. Beer. But Beer and
other imperial writers assumed that the widespread smuggling
was symptomatic of American discontent with the navigation acts,
and it was upon this point that Dickerson sharply disagreed. He
denied that the colonists in the period before 1763 either regarded
the system as a grievance or made any serious attempt to evade
it except in the case of tea and sugar after the passage of the
Molasses Act in 1733. In general, he found that the system was
adequately enforced without major objections from the colonists,
who appreciated the fact that its benefits far outweighed its ob¬
jectionable features. These findings, Dickerson argued, indicated
that the navigation acts were the “cement of empire,” a positive
force binding the colonies to the mother country.
This happy arrangement was upset in 1764, when the British
undertook to substitute a policy of trade taxation for the older
system of trade protection and encouragement. With the Sugar
Act of that year British officials introduced stricter customs and
commercial arrangements designed to produce more revenue. This
new policy, Dickerson argued, destroyed the empire in little more
than a decade. Taxes and incidental charges arising from meas¬
ures adopted over the next twelve years drained over £600,000
from the colonies, and the effect of these regulations was com-
^Philadelphia, 1951.
20 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
pounded because the bulk of the taxes fell most heavily upon
the more Important commercial towns, which were at the fore¬
front of the Revolutionary movement. But “England’s most fateful
decision,” Dickerson declared in his most important new con¬
clusion, was included as part of the Townshend revenue program:
the establishment, in 1767 at Boston, of a separate Board of
Customs for the continental colonies. Previously, American cus¬
toms collection had been supervised from London, and administra¬
tion, tempered by the desire of British merchants to keep Ameri¬
can trade running smoothly, had been relatively mild. Receiving
their salaries out of collections, the commissioners of the new
board, however, literally began to wage war on colonial com¬
merce. Between 1768 and 1772 they engaged in what Dickerson,
accepting at face value contemporary colonial opinion, judged
was little less than “customs racketeering,” as they employed legal
technicalities and unscrupulous methods to plunder large amounts
from colonial merchants, including such future Revolutionary
leaders as John Hancock and Henry Laurens. The more blatant
abuses came to an end after 1770 as the commissioners and their
supporters lost influence in Britain, but the damage had been
done, and it was their wholesale attack on American liberty and
property, not American opposition to the old navigation system
or addiction to smuggling, that caused the intense colonial hos¬
tility to the new board.
At no time after 1763, Dickerson concluded, did Americans
express dissatisfaction with either the philosophy or the operation
of the old navigation acts. In fact, they opposed the new measures
because they were not primarily trade regulations of the older
type. Nevertheless, convinced that colonial resistance meant
Americans were trying to throw off the navigation system, British
officials took an increasingly stricter line and thus provided the
only real foundation for the subsequent charge by later historians
that colonials were unhappy with the navigation acts. Only insofar
as colonial discontent was fostered by British efforts to enforce
a system thought to be under attack, Dickerson declared, were
the navigation acts in any sense an important issue in the con¬
troversy with Britain.
Other historians have disagreed with Dickerson about the
colonial attitude toward the navigation system and the effects
of the system on the colonial economy. In his detailed study of
the operation of the customs service, Trade & Empire: The British
Customs Service in Colonial America, 1600—1775, 30 Thomas C.
“Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
INTRODUCTION 21
Barrow agreed with Dickerson that American discontent with the
navigation system in the years immediately piror to the Revo¬
lution stemmed largely from the reforms adopted after 1763. But
he argued convincingly that the early opposition of the colonists
to the system, between 1660 and 1720, indicated that they found
it and the philosophy behind it fundamentally objectionable and
that their acquiesence between 1720 and 1760 depended not
upon their acceptance of the system, as Dickerson contended, but
upon its lax enforcement. Two other students, Lawrence A.
Harper 31 and Curtis P. Nettels, 32 argued that the burdens placed
on the colonies by the navigation acts far exceeded the benefits.
Although both admitted that there was little overt dissatisfaction
with the acts among the colonists prior to 1763, they argued, like
Barrow, that the colonists’ failure to protest against the acts was
not because they were the cement of empire but because they
were not strictly enforced. And while Harper and Nettels also
admitted that colonial objections after 1763 were limited primar¬
ily to the new regulatory and revenue measures, they suggested
that those objections implied, even if few colonists were con¬
scious of the implication, a fundamental discontent with the
intent and thrust of the navigation system. On the basis of more
sophisticated and systematic analytical techniques, however, Rob¬
ert Paul Thomas has recently indicated that Dickerson was closer
to the truth than either Harper or Nettels. Finding that between
1763 and 1772 the annual per capita loss to the colonists averaged
only about twenty-six cents per person or about one-half of one
per cent of estimated per capita income, Thomas concluded that
neither the navigation acts nor the new trade regulations adopted
after 1763 imposed significant economic hardships upon the
colonial economy. 33 Of course, Thomas’ discoveries do not mean
that powerful and articulate segments of the colonial population
such as the New England merchants or the large Virginia planters
might not have borne an unduly high proportion of the total loss
and that for some such groups the navigation acts as they were
enforced after 1763 might have constituted a serious grievance.
31 “The Effects of the Navigation Acts on the Thirteen Colonies,” in The
Era of the American Revolution: Studies Inscribed to Evarts Boutell Greene,
Richard B. Morris ed. (New York, 1939), 1—39, and “Mercantilism and the
American Revolution,” Canadian Historical Review, XXIII (March, 1942),
24-34.
32 “British Mercantilism and the Economic Development of the Thirteen
Colonies,” Journal of Economic History, XII (Spring, 1952), 105—114.
33 “A Quantitative Approach to the Study of the Effects of British Imperial
Policy upon Colonial Welfare: Some Preliminary Findings,” ibid., XXV
(December, 1965), 615-638.
22 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
as Harper and Nettels suggested. Obviously, additional research
will be required before these arguments can be evaluated more
fully, but one point seems to have been rather firmly established:
the colonists were not unhappy with the navigation system as it
operated in the decades just before 1763, although their accep-
tance of the system may have depended largely on the fact that
it was only loosely administered.
That political relations for much the same reasons were equally
satisfactory to the colonists prior to 1763 was my argument in
The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the
Southern Royal Colonies , 1689-1776 From the last decades of
the seventeenth century, colonial officials in London had en¬
visioned a highly centralized empire with a uniform political
system in each of the colonies and with the imperial government
exercising strict supervision over the subordinate governments.
But they had never made any sustained or systematic attempt to
achieve these goals during the first half of the eighteenth century.
The result, if the experience of the four southern royal colonies
was typical, was the development of a working arrangement that
permitted colonial lower houses considerable latitude in shaping
the constitutions of the colonies without requiring Crown officials
to relinquish any of their ideals. Sporadic and largely ineffective
opposition from London officials and royal governors did not
prevent the lower houses from acquiring an impressive array of
de facto powers and privileges and, in the process, transforming
themselves from the dependent lawmaking bodies they originally
were intended to be into miniature Houses of Commons and, in
almost every colony, shifting the constitutional center of power
from the executive to themselves. The growing divergence be¬
tween imperial ideals and colonial reality mattered litde so long
as each side refrained from openly challenging the other. Severe
friction in this area did not develop until after 1763 when Parlia¬
ment and the Crown in its executive capacity challenged at several
important points the authority of the lower houses and the con¬
stitutional structures they had been forging over the previous
century and a half. Then, the sanctity of the rights and privileges
of the lower houses became a major issue between the home
government and the colonists as imperial officials insisted upon
an adherence to the old imperial ideals while colonial legislators,
in the course of trying first to draw a line between the authority
of Parliament and the lower houses and then to delimit the
^Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963.
INTRODUCTION 23
boundaries of royal power in the colonies, came to demand rigid
guarantees of colonial rights and eventually imperial recognition
of the autonomy of the lower houses in local affairs and the
equality of the lower houses with Parliament. Like the navigation
system, then, which was satisfactory to the colonists largely be¬
cause it was laxly enforced, political and constitutional relations
were not a source of serious tension prior to 1763 largely because
imperial authorities had never made any sustained attempt to
make colonial practice correspond to imperial ideals.
Carl Bridenbaugh reached a somewhat different conclusion
about the impact of the Anglican attempt to secure a complete
episcopal establishment in the colonies. His detailed exploration
of that subject, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas,
Personalities, and Politics, 1689-1775, 35 not only pointed out the
importance of this concrete religious issue in the coming of the
Revolution in the middle colonies and New England but also
argued that the “aggressive” tactics of the Anglicans in those
colonies and the long, and at times bitter, debate over the epis¬
copacy question between 1689 and 1760 already had helped to
alienate many American dissenters from the mother country long
before 1763. Because the advocates of episcopacy were never able
to persuade the custodians of the empire to take any concrete
steps toward implementing their program, however, the threat of
an American bishopric remained no more than a threat and, how¬
ever alarming to the dissenting clergy and others actively engaged
in opposing it, it does not seem to have created sufficient discon¬
tent among the colonists at large to have made them unhappy
with their connection with Britain. Significantly, as Bridenbaugh
indicated, the climax of the episcopacy dispute came during the
crucial years between 1760 and 1765 when the vigorous efforts
of Archbishop Thomas Seeker to secure an American episcopate
convinced many American dissenters that an Anglican plot was
in the making, caused them to fear lest the Grenville legislation
and an American bishropric might be part of the same general
scheme to curtail American liberties, and contributed substantially
to the explosive reaction to the Stamp Act in the northern colonies.
If, however, the furor over the episcopacy question helped to in¬
crease the intensity of the northern reaction to other measures
in 1764—1765, the issue also appears to have loomed much more
seriously in association with those measures and to have been
distinctly secondary to them.
35 New York, 1962.
24 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
With the profusion of British patriotism that poured from the
colonies throughout the Seven Years’ War and their notable pro¬
pensity for quarreling among themselves, the absence of serious
friction between the mother country and her North American
possessions, in the economic, political, or religious realm, in 1763
made the possibility of a united revolt by the colonies against
Britain seem remote indeed. But the patriotism and the bickering,
like the absence of friction, were, several writers have recently
indicated, extremely deceptive. As Clinton Rossiter has argued
in Seedtime of the Republic , 36 a lengthy discussion of the formal
concepts of colonial political thought, by the middle of the eight¬
eenth century colonial Americans had developed, out of their
English intellectual heritage and a century and a half of practical
experience, a common political faith. At the heart of that faith
was a philosophy of “ethical, ordered liberty” that found expres-
sion in and served as the foundation for the arguments advanced
by Americans during the Revolutionary crisis. That the develop¬
ment of these common political ideas was accompanied by the
emergence of common attitudes, values, and traditions in all
other areas of colonial thought was the thesis of Max Savelle
in Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind, 37 a gen¬
eral survey of eighteenth-century colonial culture. By 1750,
Savelle contended, the colonists were one people culturally, with
a latent American loyalty and American nationalism. Savelle was
careful to emphasize that during the closing years of the Seven
Years’ War this American loyalty was submerged under an orgy
of British patriotic sentiment as Americans celebrated the great
British victories in Canada, the West Indies, and Europe; the
accession of a vigorous young king, George III, in 1760; and the
great Peace of Paris in 1763, which made the British Empire the
most extensive and powerful in the Western world since Rome.
Never, Savelle admitted, had British nationalism been stronger
in the colonies. Yet, he argued, the effusions of British patriotism,
however sincere, served to conceal a powerful, if still largely
dormant, spirit of American nationalism that was waiting to be
nourished by the British challenge between 1763 and 1766. 38
These conclusions have recently been confirmed by Richard L.
36 New York, 1953.
37 New York, 1948. Savelle expanded on this theme later in “Nationalism
and Other Loyalties in the American Revolution,” American Historical
Review, LXVII (July, 1961), 901-923.
^For another discussion of this point see Paul A. Varg, “The Advent of
Nationalism, 1758-1776” American Quarterly , XVI (Summer, 1964) 160-
INTRODUCTION 25
Merritt in Symbols of American Community, 1735—1775. m Seek¬
ing some way to measure more precisely the American sense
of community, he turned to colonial newspapers, the importance
of which in stimulating opposition to Britain after 1763 had been
emphasized earlier by Arthur M. Schlesinger. 40 By using content
analysis and counting the explicit verbal symbols of identification
—e.g., “American,” “Europe,” “Great Britain,” ‘^Virginia,” “Massa¬
chusetts”—in a carefully selected sample of the newspapers, he
discovered that the colonists had already “developed a fairly high
degree of community awareness” well before 1763. By stimulating
the colonists 5 pride in being Britons and by demanding an un¬
usual amount of American attention to the home country and
its military exploits, the Seven Years 5 Wax had, in fact, actually
operated as a temporary brake upon the growth of that awareness.
As soon as the war was over, however, the American sense of
community increased perceptibly. The “takeoff 55 point, Merritt
found, came during the early summer of 1763, well before any
of the British measures that Americans found objectionable had
gone into effect. The nature of his data did not enable him to
explain why the colonists were becoming increasingly interested
in one another, and to answer that question he fell back upon
some of the integrative forces—the emergence during the middle
decades of the eighteenth century of intercolonial trading patterns
and communications networks, an interlocking elite, and closer
interurban ties—previously emphasized by Michael Kraus 41 and
Carl Bridenbaugh. 42 Whatever “caused 55 this development, how¬
ever, it was, Merritt suggested, an important element in enabling
the colonists to offer united resistance during the Stamp Act crisis,
“which, in its turn, made a further contribution to the developing
sense of American community. 55 The debate with Britain, then,
was, as Savelle had suggested, not the origin of American national
sentiment but a powerful “impetus to a moving political force
already underway.” Each successive crisis reinforced “the colo¬
nists 5 growing sense of American separatism” until by 1775 they
had crossed what Merritt called the “threshold 55 of functional and
psychological political amalgamation which enabled them to form
national political institutions and to fight a war against Britain.
This growing sense of American community, then, helps to ex-
^New Haven, 1966.
40 Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain , 1764—1776
(New York, 1958).
41 Intercolonial Aspects of American Culture on the Eve of the Revolution ,
with Special Reference to the Northern Towns (New York, 1928).
^Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America. 1743—1776 (New York, 1955).
26 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
plain how thirteen diverse and often quarreling colonies could
in just twelve short years sufficiently overcome their differences
and unite against the mother country.
That the colonists strong feelings of British patriotism in 1763
depended to a large extent upon a conception of the role of the
colonies in the British Empire that itself reflected the expanding
sense of community among the colonies was suggested by Richard
Koebner in Empire* 3 a study in political semantics. This investi¬
gation of the history of the terms “empire,” “imperial ” and “im¬
perialism” in the language of Western Europe from Rome to the
Congress of Vienna contained a large section on British and
colonial uses of the terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen¬
turies. It showed that the notion of the British Empire did not
acquire a prominent place in British historical consciousness until
after the Glorious Revolution and that even then it was an ex¬
tremely restricted concept that referred only to Great Britain and
Ireland and not to British possessions overseas. Only after 1740
did the colonies acquire a place in the empire, and then the impetus
for that development came from the colonies, not the home
islands. Aware of their increasing importance to Britain and ex¬
hilarated by their vision of future greatness, Americans began to
conceive of the colonies as the “British Empire in America,” and
out of this concept emerged the idea of the empire as a world-wide
political system held together by mutual allegiance and the har¬
mony of interests among the constituent parts. This vision was,
however, strictly an American creation, and in the decade preced¬
ing the Revolution it became clear that British officials had not
yet come to regard the colonies as part of the empire, much less
as the equal partners some Americans thought them to be. That
British officials, with the notable exception of Massachusetts Gov-
ernor Francis Bernard, did not understand that the American
view of the empire included the colonies and could not, therefore,
appreciate the implications of equality inherent in that concept
helps to explain why they were constantly surprised at the extent
of American demands, were unable to grasp the fundamental
assumptions behind American constitutional arguments, and so
oroughly misconstrued the nature of American intentions. When
hey did begin m the 1760’s to employ a broader concept of em¬
pire that took m the colonies, they used it as a device to bring
about a more unified constitutional arrangement that would guar-
"Cambridge, England, 1961.
1!
INTRODUCTION 27
antee the subordination, not the equality, of the colonies. This
profound divergence of thought between Great Britain and the
colonies about the current and future role of the colonies in the
British political community—a divergence that contributed sub¬
stantially to the breakdown in communications that occurred be¬
tween 1763 and 1776—helps make clear both why American
leaders felt such an extraordinary sense of betrayal at the new
measures adopted after 1763 and how the extreme British national
feeling they expressed in the early 1760’s could be dissipated so
quickly over the next decade as it became increasingly clear that
the imperial government did not share their conception of the
place of the colonies in the empire.
What all of these newer studies seem to indicate, then, is that
imperial-colonial relations were largely satisfactory to the colonies
prior to 1763 only because potentially objectionable aspects of
British economic and political policy were loosely enforced and
that British national sentiment in the colonies remained high to
an important extent because of the colonists’ exaggerated view of
their own importance within the imperial community. It is clear
in retrospect that the shattering of that view and/or the strict
enforcement of imperial policy was bound to stir resentment and
opposition in the colonies. Had relations continued to follow the
same pattern after 1763 that they did before, however, it is en¬
tirely possible that the colonists would have been as pleased with
their British connection in 1776 and 1787 as they were in 1763.
The Whig and imperial historians to the contrary notwithstanding,
then, recent studies strongly suggest that the Revolution cannot
be attributed either primarily or directly to colonial discontent
with conditions as they operated before the 1760’s.
Political, Social, and Economic Divisions
Within the Colonies
Still other scholars have directed their attention to the detailed
study of political life within the individual colonies during the era
of the Revolution, and their findings indicate that major modifica¬
tions are required in the Progressive conception of both early
American politics and the Revolution. Investigators of Maryland,
New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Georgia,
and Virginia have analyzed the impact of the debate with Britain
upon local politics and assessed the importance of the peculiar
configuration of the economic, social, and political life of each
28 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
colony in shaping its response to that debate. 44 Although these
works reveal that the relative importance of the major substantive
issues and the pattern of the Revolutionary movement varied con¬
siderably from colony to colony and that there were special, and
occasionally extremely significant, local grievances against the
imperial government in almost every colony, they also call atten¬
tion to some important common features. Everywhere relations
with Britain were relatively harmonious prior to 1763 and politics
within the colonies were primarily elitist in nature. Public office—
both appointive and elective—and political leadership were se¬
curely in the hands of upper-class groups, and, although there
were occasional manifestations of social and economic discontent
among the lower classes, that discontent never resulted in wide¬
spread demands for basic changes in the customary patterns of
u PP er ~ c l ass leadership. Political divisions, despite the earlier con¬
tentions of Lincoln and Becker, were not along class lines and
not between rival ideological groups of radicals and conservatives.
Rather, they revolved around the ambitions of rival factions
among the elite. The debate with Britain was in many instances
the occasion for one faction to gain political predominance at the
expense of its rivals, but, significantly, the faction that stood for
the strongest line of resistance to British policy usually emerged
victorious. Within the colonies, then, the direction of local politics
and the balance of political forces were influenced, and in some
cases^ altered profoundly, by the debate after 1763 over Parlia¬
ment s authority and the extent of the Crown’s prerogative in the
colonies. The constitutional debate was thus not only the primary
political concern within most colonies from 1763 to 1776, these
studies seem to indicate, but also the most powerful agency of
political change.
Chiles A. Barker, The Background of the Revolution in Maryland (New
Haven, 1940); Donald L. Kemmerer, Path to Freedom: The Struggle for
Self-Government m Colonial New Jersey, 1703-1776 (Princeton, 1940)-
Connecticut^ Years of Controversy , 1750-1776 (Chapel
Hill N.C., 1949); Theodore Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth
of Democracy, 1740-1776 (Harrisburg, Pa. 1953); David Hawke In the
C™L°Jrr a p *f'° i “ Hon ( P^ a d e lpM a > 1961); Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime
w 7 Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wis., 1963); David S. Love-
Pobt ? cs a ” d th ? American Revolution, 1760-1776 (Provi-
KeIu l eth ^Coleman, The American Revolution in Georgia
( r A * enS ; G ^> 19 58); W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia
J t J ( 1 Chapel HlU ’ N.C., 1959); and Thad W. Tate, “The ComiTa
Class 6 1763^1776“ “ Y“ ginia: , B “ tain ’® Challenge to Virginia’s Rulinf
1962), 323-343 76, Wdbam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XIX (July,
INTRODUCTION 20
An even more direct challenge to the Progressive conception of
the Revolution came from Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown in
two studies of the relationship between politics and social struc¬
ture in Massachusetts and Virginia (Middle-Class Democracy and
the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691—1780 and Virginia, 1705—
1786: Democracy or Aristocracy ?).' 45 The Browns 7 discoveries that
in both colonies the economic structure was highly fluid, property
widely distributed, and lower-class economic and social discontent
minimal indicated that neither colony was so rigidly stratified as
to produce the kind of social conflicts which Progressive historians
thought were the stuff of colonial politics. By showing as well that
the franchise was considerably wider than had previously been
supposed, the Browns also demonstrated that the predominance
of the upper classes in politics did not depend upon a restricted
franchise, that they had to have the support of men from all
classes to gain elective office.
That both of these conclusions are probably also applicable to
most other colonies is indicated by the findings of several other
recent independent investigations of Connecticut, New York, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. 46 All of these studies
argue that the franchise in these colonies was very wide and that
the vast majority of free adult males could expect to acquire
enough property during their lifetimes to meet suffrage require¬
ments. Similarly, Jackson Turner Main in The Social Structure of
Revolutionary America* 1 demonstrated that, although there were
great extremes in wealth and in standards and styles of living in
American society during the late eighteenth century, it was every¬
where relatively free from poverty and had, especially by European
standards, a high rate of vertical mobility, great social and eco¬
nomic opportunity, and a remarkably supple class structure. This
combination of economic abundance and social fluidity, Main
concluded, tended “to minimize those conflicts which might have
grown out of the class structure and the concentration of wealth 77
that was occurring in older settled areas on the eve of the Revo¬
lution.
^Ithaca, N.Y., 1955, and East Lansing, Mich., 1964, respectively.
^Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent
(New York, 1961); Milton M. Klein, “Democracy and Politics in Colonial
New York,” New York History , XL (July, 1959), 221-246; Richard P.
McCormick, The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study of the Develop¬
ment of Election Machinery, 1664-1911 (New Brunswick, 1953); Thayer,
op. cit.; and Lovejoy, op. cit.
47 Princeton, 1965.
30 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Other studies of the underlying assumptions and modes of be¬
havior of early American politics by J. R. Pole 48 and Richard
Buel, Jr., 49 have helped to resolve what, within the modem demo¬
cratic conceptions employed by the Progressive historians and
such recent writers as Robert E. Brown, was such a massive and
incomprehensible paradox: why, in the words of Pole, "the great
mass of the common people might actually have given their con¬
sent to concepts of government” that by "systematically” excluding
them "from the more responsible positions of political power”
restricted "their own participation in ways completely at variance
with the principles of modem democracy.” Revolutionary society,
these studies have found, was essentially what Walter Bagehot
called "a deferential society” that operated within an integrated
structure of ideas fundamentally elitist in nature. That structure
of ideas assumed, among other things, that government should
be entrusted to men of merit; that merit was very often, though
by no means always, associated with wealth and social position;
that men of merit were obliged to use their talents for the benefit
of the public; and that deference to them was the implicit duty
of the rest of society. All society was therefore divided between
the rulers and the ruled, and the rulers, including the representa¬
tives of the people, were not the tools of the people but their po¬
litical superiors. "The mass of the people,” Buel argued, thus
"elected representatives not to order them around like lackeys to
do the people’s bidding, but to reap benefit from the distinguished
abilities of the few upon which the safety of society might in
large measure depend” and to utilize the "political expertise of the
realm in the people’s behalf.” To be sure, representative institu¬
tions provided the people with the means to check any unwarranted
abuses of power by their rulers, but the power the people possessed
was "not designed to facilitate the expression of their will in
politics but to defend them from oppression.” Both Pole and Buel
concluded that, although these assumptions were undermined by
the Revolution and eventually gave way after 1790 to an expanded
conception of the people’s role in the polity, they continued to be
the predominant elements underlying American political thought
over the whole period from 1763 to 1789.
Obviously, many more specialized studies of developments
within individual colonies will be required before the nature of
48 ^Historians and the Problem of Early American Democracy,” Ameri¬
can Historical Review, LXVU (April, 1962), 626-646.
^“Democracy and the American Revolution: A Frame of Reference,” Wil¬
liam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXI (April, 1964), 165-190.
INTRODUCTION 31
internal political divisions and their relationship to the coming of
the Revolution will be understood fully. The investigations already
published do, however, suggest four tentative conclusions that
flatly contradict earlier arguments of the Progressive historians:
the configuration of politics and the nature of social and economic
divisions varied enormously from state to state; social and political
opportunity was remarkably wide; class struggle and the demand
for democracy on the part of unprivileged groups were not wide¬
spread and not a primary causative factor in the coming of the
Revolution; and colonial political life operated within a structure
of commonly-accepted values that assigned positions of leadership
in the polity to members of the social and economic elite.
The Estrangement of the Colonies , 1763—1776
One of the results of the discoveries that tensions between
Britain and the colonies prior to 1763 were relatively mild and
that political rivalries within the colonies were, in most cases,
distinctly secondary in importance to the constitutional debate
with Britain between 1763 and 1776 has been that historians have
increasingly come to focus more directly upon that debate in their
search for an explanation for the coming of the Revolution. The
guiding question in this search has been why the colonists became
unhappy enough in the years after 1763 to revolt. To answer this
question a number of historians have sought to identify and assess
the importance of the several substantive issues between the
colonies and Great Britain.
Thus Bernhard Knollenberg explored the nature and areas of
American discontent during the early 1760’s in Origin of the
American Revolution: 1759—1766 . 50 Although he agreed with other
recent writers that Americans were generally happy with existing
political and economic relationships with Britain through the
middle decades of the eighteenth century, he contended that
trouble began not in 1763 but in 1759, when British military suc¬
cesses made it unnecessary to placate the colonies further and
permitted imperial authorities to inaugurate a stricter policy.
Under the leadership of the Earls of Granville and Halifax, presi¬
dents respectively of the Privy Council and Board of Trade and
longtime advocates of a tougher colonial policy. Crown officials
undertook a series of new and provocative measures intended to
weaken colonial self-government and, Knollenberg implied, check
“New York, 1960.
32 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tendencies which British officials feared might be leading toward
independence. Over the next four years a wider and more inten¬
sive use of such traditional checks as the royal instructions and
legislative review seriously antagonized colonial leaders in almost
every colony. Separately, none of these measures was very im¬
portant, but their concentration within a short period, Knollenberg
contended, produced a significant amount of discontent through-
out the colonies. That discontent increased measurably beginning
in the spring of 1762, when first the Bute and then the Grenville
ministries undertook a variety of general reform measures de¬
signed to tighten up the colonial system. In 1763 came a series
of steps that was particularly unpopular in New England, includ¬
ing the decision to use the royal navy to curb smuggling and to
enforce the previously laxly administered Molasses Act of 1733
and various white pines acts. Also in 1763, imperial officials de¬
cided to station a large standing army in the colonies and to limit
western expansion into the region beyond the Allegheny moun-
tains. Security was the primary consideration behind both meas¬
ures, but it was easy for Americans to interpret the former as an
attempt to overawe them with force and the latter as a strategem
to confine them to the seacoast—motives, Knollenberg found,
which actually did play some small part in the decisions. The
necessity of paying for the army led to the decision to tax the
colonies and to Parliaments passage in 1764 of the Sugar Act,
which provided for extensive reforms in colonial administration,
and in 1765 of the Stamp Act, which touched off the colonial up¬
rising in 1765—1766. According to Knollenberg, then, the cumula¬
tive effect of British policy over the previous six years, and not
the Stamp Act alone, brought the colonies to the brink of rebellion
during the Stamp Act crisis.
That the Stamp Act and the threat of parhamentary taxation
which it contained were easily the most important sources of
American dissatisfaction in the uprising of 1765-1766 has, how¬
ever, been persuasively argued by Edmund S. Morgan and Helen
M. Morgan in The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution 51
one of the two or three most important books published on the era
of the Revolution since World War II. On the basis of a new and
thorough reexamination of what was probably already the most
studied of the events preceding the Revolution, the Morgans
reached several important new conclusions that fundamentally
challenged older interpretations. They found, for example, that
n Chapel HUl, N.C., 1953.
INTRODUCTION 33
the offer by George Grenville to entertain suggestions from the
colonies for taxing themselves was less than sincere, that he had,
in fact, already decided upon a stamp tax by the time he first
suggested it to Parliament in 1764. Both the Massachusetts As¬
sembly and colonial agents in London tried unsuccessfully to act
on the offer, but the fact was that Grenville neither communicated
it to the colonies through official channels nor formulated it in
terms precise enough to permit definite action. The year’s delay,
the Morgans concluded, was merely to permit the ministry to work
out details of the Stamp Act. 52 This discovery seriously under¬
mined one of the central arguments of both the imperial and Pro¬
gressive historians: that the colonists’ failure to suggest alterna¬
tives to the Stamp Act indicated that they were opposed not to
taxation without representation but to taxation in general. The
argument was weakened still further by the Morgans’ findings that
Americans objected to all forms of parliamentary taxation for
revenue in 1764-1765 and not simply to internal taxes, as both
imperial and Progressive historians had implied. That the colo¬
nists had distinguished between internal and external taxes was
widely believed in England, but the Morgans found no such dis¬
tinction in contemporary American statements. Both American
legislators and pamphlet writers categorically denied Parliament’s
authority to levy any taxes for revenue purposes—a principle to
which they consistently adhered for the next decade. 53 In the light
of this evidence it became clear the traditional charge that Amer¬
icans were inconsistent and continually enlarged their claims as
the situation changed was not valid.
The Morgans’ study strongly suggested that American concern
for and devotion to the constitutional arguments they employed
were considerably greater than most scholars during the previous
half century had assumed, and demonstrated the importance of
political and constitutional considerations in the American case
against the Sugar and Stamp Acts. As the subtitle suggested, the
work argued for the decisiveness of the Stamp Act crisis in the
unfolding Revolutionary drama. Not only did it raise the issue of
the extent of Parliament’s jurisdiction in the colonies by forcing
American leaders and Parliament into a precise formulation of
directly opposing views, but it also created an atmosphere of
52 This argument is set forth in greater detail in Edmund S. Morgan, “The
Postponement of the Stamp Act,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., VII
(July, 1950), 353-392.
^For a more thorough elaboration of this point see Edmund S. Morgan,
“Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power,” ibid., V (July, 1948), 311—341.
34 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
mutual suspicion that pervaded all subsequent developments and
quite possibly precluded any peaceful settlement of the issue.
Thereafter, Americans scrutinized every parliamentary action for
possible threats to their constitutional rights, while British authori-
ties became increasingly convinced that American opposition was
simply a prelude to an eventual attempt to shake off the restraints
of the navigation acts and perhaps even political dependence.
Other scholars analyzed in detail the American reaction to still
other issues during the period from 1760 to 1776. The works of
Dickerson, Barrow, Bridenbaugh, and myself, treating respectively
the colonial reaction to the new trade restrictions, customs regu¬
lations, proposals for an American episcopate, and attacks on
assembly rights, have already been discussed. Carl Ubbelohde’s
The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution 54 and
John Shy s Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army and
the Coming of the American Revolution, 55 have, as the titles in¬
dicate, explored the response to the vice-admiralty courts and the
army. Although the vice-admiralty courts had been in existence
since 1696, they never, Ubbelohde found, became the object of
deep colonial hostility prior to 1763, largely because colonial
merchants and others involved with them had been able to avoid
them. When, however, imperial authorities sought after 1763 to
make the courts a “cornerstone in the new imperial rule” by a
series of new and stricter regulations, colonial opposition hardened
noticeably. Still, the courts did not come under major attack until
after Parliament had given them jurisdiction over the enforcement
of first the Sugar and Stamp Acts and then the Townshend Reve-
nue Act. Americans, drawing a fundamental distinction between
the old trade regulations and the new revenue measures, argued
that to try cases arising under the revenue laws in juryless vice¬
admiralty courts deprived them of their ancient right of trial by
jury. In Britain such cases were tried before juries in the common
law Court of Exchequer, and to alter that procedure in the colonies
seemed to be to create an invidious distinction, as well as a basic
inequality of rights, between Englishmen and Americans. 56 Yet,
Ubbelohde concluded, however intrinsically objectionable Amer¬
icans found the courts, their hostility to them ebbed and flowed
with their dissatisfaction over questions of greater moment, and
M Chapel Hill, N. C., 1960.
65 Princeton, 1965.
P 0 * ft! * s txeated more fully in David S. Lovejoy,
ca S 176^7 ! 7fi ” wft-* 7: Th ! ?f SG ^f amst Admiralty Jurisdiction in Amer-
59-^484 17?6 ’ Wllham and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XVI (October, 1959),
INTRODUCTION 35
it was really the association of the courts with the new revenue
laws and other broad objectives of British policy after 1763 that
made them seem so onerous to the colonists.
Shy reached a similar conclusion about the army. Kept in the
colonies after the Seven Years' War largely to occupy and defend
the non-English rim of the expanded North American empire and
to help in the management of Indian affairs, the army was viewed
with suspicion by some colonials who suspected that it might be
intended as a coercive force. These suspicions, Shy found, were
in part true: the possibility that an American garrison could help
to put “some teeth in the imperial system" was actually a second¬
ary consideration with British administrators. Not until the Stamp
Act crisis did they come to conceive of the army as primarily “a
police force." Yet, because the army was not used in that way
during the crisis, there was relatively little overt colonial opposi¬
tion to it. Only after September, 1768, when troops had been sent
to Boston specifically to quell the disturbances over the Townshend
Acts, did colonial leaders begin to suggest widely that the osten¬
sible motive—the security of the colonies from external attack—
for originally stationing the army in America was simply a pre¬
text for forcing the colonists to obey the authority of Parliament
and the directions of the ministry. Thereafter, polemicists repeat¬
edly warned of the dangers of a standing army to the liberties and
morals of the public, and the Boston Massacre, though it led to
the removal of most of the troops from Boston and the eventual
diminution of hostility to the army, only seemed to justify the
warnings. Like the vice-admiralty courts, however, the army did
not in the years before Lexington and Concord become “a major
grievance in itself." Rather, Shy concluded, its primary importance
lay in the fact that it "reinforced American attitudes on other
issues."
The final crisis of the pre-Revolutionary years was analyzed in
detail by Benjamin Woods Labaree in The Boston Tea Party. 57
The tea party, he argued, was the decisive event in the chain of
events that led to the outbreak of war and the Declaration of In¬
dependence. It was the tea party, he pointed out, that produced a
new spirit of unity among the colonies, after more than two years
of disharmony following the ab andonment of the nonimportation
agreements against the Townshend duties in 1770, and finally
determined British officials to take a firm stand against colonial
opposition to parliamentary taxation by making an example of
57 New York, 1964.
36 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Boston. The punitive measures they adopted posed the new and
disturbing question of whether the colonists had any rights at all
with which to protect themselves from the naked power of Parlia¬
ment, caused the rest of the colonies to unite behind Boston, drove
patriot leaders to deny that Parliament had any authority what-
ever over the internal affairs of the colonies, and put both sides
into an inflamed state that made wax a virtual certainty. In an
important modification of a long-accepted interpretation, Labaree
also discovered that among American smugglers of Dutch tea the
fear that the Tea Act of 1773 would enable the East India Com¬
pany to undersell them and so gain a monopoly of the American
market was less important in stirring resistance to East India
Company tea than Progressive historians had suggested. Although
he did not deny that the tea smugglers, who were largely confined
to New York and Philadelphia, were concerned over the threat of
monopoly, he found it a distinctly secondary issue among patriot
leaders and the public at large. What concerned them far more
was the possibility that the Tea Act was simply a clever ruse to
inveigle them into paying the tea duty and admitting the long-
contested right of Parliament to tax the colonies for revenue. By
this discovery Labaree strongly seconded the argument of other
recent writers: that constitutional rights, especially Parliament’s
attempts to tax the colonies for revenue, were the primary issues
between Britain and the colonies in the fateful years from 1763
to 1776.
Although important issues, such as imperial prohibition of legal
tender paper currency 58 and western expansion, 59 still require
fiirther study, these investigations have together made it possible
to achieve a rather clear understanding of the importance and
relative weight of the several substantive issues in the American
case against the British government. Important segments of the
colonists had occasionally been offended or alarmed by such
things as the Anglican effort to secure an American episcopate or
the sporadic attempts by imperial officials to curtail the power
of the lower houses of assembly, but the colonists were generally
A «i? ef ^ treatment * of issue is J ack P* Greene and Richard M. Jelli-
Currency Act of 1764 in Imperial-Colonial Relations, 1764-1776,”
WxOmm and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XVIII (October, 1961), 485-518.
w aT !rt U , S1 °^. of lhe classic stu <iy of British western policy—Clarence
1 Q 17 ?w T tL Mlss ™ s iVWiJalley in British Politics (2 vols., Cleveland,
w^°^f d h l ****& oi several scholars, most notably
the W ildern ess: The Middle West in British
1760-1775 (Lincoln, Neb., 1961), although neither Alvord
poMcy red m d ad Ae 6X16321 and nature of colonial discontent
INTRODUCTION 37
satisfied with their connection with Britain before imperial officials
adopted stricter measures after 1760 that fundamentally chal¬
lenged American rights and property. Parliament’s attempts to
tax the colonies for revenue were fax and away the most serious
of these measures. Though the colonists found them profoundly
disturbing in themselves and though their concentration over so
short a period unquestionably contributed to the intensity of the
colonial response to the challenge from Parliament, none of the
other measures—the effort to tighten the navigation system, the
attempt to undermine the authority of the lower houses, the em¬
ployment of the army as a coercive force, the increased use of the
vice-admiralty courts, or the threat to establish an American
episcopate—loomed so importantly or stirred such widespread,
determined, and pointed opposition. The remarkable consistency
of their constitutional demands down to 1774 revealed both the
intense commitment of the colonists to the constitutional prin¬
ciples on which they stood and their genuine concern about the
constitutional question. Only after 1774, as I emphasized in The
Quest for Power, did the American protest cease to be largely a
series of defensive responses to immediate provocations by the
imperial government and become an aggressive movement intent
not just on securing exemption for the colonies from all parlia¬
mentary measures but also, in a striking escalation of their earlier
demands, strict limitations upon the Crown’s use of many of its
traditional devices of royal control over the colonies. Throughout
the entire debate, however, the primary issues in the minds of
the colonists were, then, essentially of a political and constitu¬
tional nature involving matters of corporate rights, political power,
individual liberty, security of property, and rule of law. Although,
as Edmund S. Morgan has taken pains to emphasize (T he Birth of
the Republic, 1763-89), 60 all of these objects of concern were
intimately coupled with "self-interest” and were conceived of as
the necessary safeguards of the colonists’ fundamental well-being
—social and economic, as well as political—the opposition to
Great Britain, these new studies would seem to indicate, was much
less directly social and economic in character than earlier his¬
torians had suggested.
These conclusions have been considerably enriched and some¬
what altered by several recent explorations of the assumptions,
traditions, conventions, and habits of thought that underlay and
conditioned the American response to the substantive issues in the
“Chicago, 1956.
38 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
quarrel with Britain. These studies of what is essentially the psy¬
chology of colonial resistance have been especially concerned with
the role of the Americans’ conception of human nature. At least
since the early nineteenth century it has been conventional to
attribute to the eighteenth century an optimistic conception of
man and a belief in his ability, to paraphrase one of the most
famous expositions of this view, to perfect the “good life on
earth.” 61 But this view, A. O. Lovejoy has insisted (Reflections
on Human Nature), 62 is a “radical historical error.” Some eight¬
eenth-century writers did indeed subscribe to such a view of
human nature, but, Lovejoy convincingly argued, the “most widely
prevalent opinion about human nature” was that men were im¬
perfect creatures who were usually actuated “by non-rational mo¬
tives—by ‘passions/ or arbitrary and unexamined prejudices, or
vanity, or the quest for private economic advantage.” Only be¬
cause of their “craving for reputation, praise, and applause,”
which, eighteenth-century thinkers believed, was the “dominant
and universal passion” in man, were men ever driven to behave
in a manner “necessary for the good order of society and the
progress of mankind.” This unflattering view of human nature
provided the foundation for an elaborate theory of politics which,
in its essential elements, was traceable as far back as antiquity
and which—as Z. S. Fink, 63 J. G. A. Pocock, 64 and, especially,
Caroline Robbins, 65 among others, have shown—manifested itself
in several forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English
thought and was especially congenial to those political groups on
the fringes or completely out of political power. At the heart of
this theory were the convictions that man in general could not
withstand the temptations of power, that power was by its very
nature a corrupting and aggressive force, and that liberty was its
natural victim. The protection of liberty against the malignancy
of power required that each of the various elements in the polity
had to be balanced against one another in such a way as to pre-
81 Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philoso¬
phers (New Haven, 1932).
Baltimore, 1961.
m The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of
Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, 1945).
. 64 MacMavelli,- Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the
Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXII (October,
1965), 547-583.
* 5 The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmis¬
sion, Development, and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the
Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cam¬
bridge, Mass., 1959).
INTRODUCTION 39
vent any of them from gaining ascendancy over the rest. A mixed
constitution was the means by which this delicate balance was to
be achieved, but power was so pervasive and so ruthless that
nothing was safe from it.
That this theory of politics with its underlying view of human
nature was widely diff used throughout the colonies had been
indicated earlier by Gerald Stourzh in Benjamin Franklin and
American Foreign Policy and by Caroline Robbins and Richard
Buel, Jr., in the works referred to previously, but it remained for
Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revo¬
lution^ 7 perhaps the most penetrating and original new study of
any segment of the era of the Revolution, to show precisely how
the theory shaped the American response to British measures after
1763. Within the context of the ideas associated with this theory
of politics, Bailyn found, after an intensive examination of Amer¬
ican polemical literature in the pre-Revolutionary years, the suc¬
cession of restrictive and regulatory measures taken by the British
government and royal officials in the colonies after 1763 appeared
to be unmistakable “evidence of nothing less than a deliberate
conspiracy launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both
in England and in America.” Far from being “mere rhetoric and
propaganda,” as Progressive writers had charged, such words as
slavery, corruption, and conspiracy “meant something very real to
both writers and their readers” and expressed “real fears, real
anxieties, a sense of real danger.” Above all else, Bailyn argued, it
was this reading of British behavior and “not simply an accumu¬
lation of grievances” that “in the end propelled the colonists into
rebellion. The gross distortions in their interpretation of the ac¬
tions of the British government, Bailyn implied, mattered much
less than that Americans believed it. The inner reality behind the
ostensible issues and concrete grievances, the “real” Revolution
that had so successfully eluded the Progressive historians, Bailyn
thus suggested, was not economic or even social in character but
intellectual and psychological. It was not only hard economic
interests or considerations of political power or constitutional
principles, then, but also and, Bailyn strongly implied more im¬
portantly, ideas that lay behind the manifest events of the time
and provided the key to understanding the “contemporary mean¬
ing” of the Revolution. They revealed, Bailyn insisted, not mere y
^Chicago, i qrv This volume originally appeared as the Intro-
Mass., 1965).
4 ° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken” and the
inner logic of American behavior. 68 Ideas thus played a dual role
in the coming of the Revolution. They both provided a framework
within which Americans could explain British and their own
behavior and determined in significant and fundamental ways
their responses to the developing situation.
The place of American conceptions of the past in this frame¬
work was the subject of H. Trevor Colboum’s monograph, The
Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of
the American Revolution.^ 9 As Colboum’s subtitle suggested, it
was the conception of history as set forth by seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Whig writers to which colonials were largely
devoted. That conception saw the past as a continual struggle
between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and
corruption on the other. Rome fell only after its citizens had sac¬
rificed their temperance and virtue to luxury and vice. And, al¬
though the Glorious Revolution in England had promised to re¬
store the ancient Saxon virtues and free constitution, which had
been in abeyance ever since the Norman invasion, it had not been
accompanied by a reformation in English character, with the re¬
sult that the early eighteenth century presented a dreary scene of
continuing moral degeneration and political irresponsibility—the
harbingers, English Whig writers warned, of the total collapse of
constitutional government and the eventual fall of Britain. This
interpretation of Roman and British history, Colboum argued,
helped to lead American leaders irresistibly to the conclusion that
the behavior of the British government toward the colonies after
1763 was a clear indication of its degeneration and that resistance
was the only way to preserve not merely their liberty and prop¬
erty but their virtue as well and helped to turn a political and
constitutional debate into a moral conflict.
The moral and emotional dimension of the American response
to British policy, touched on by Bailyn and Colboum, was further
emphasized in two separate articles by Edmund S. Morgan 70 and
Perry Miller. 71 Both writers called attention to an important as-
a8 Richard J. Hooker makes a similar point about Revolutionary toasts in
"The American Revolution Seen Through a Wine Glass,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XI (January, 1954), 52-77.
®*Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965.
^T'he Puritan E thic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary
larterly, 3rd ser., XXIV (January, 1967), 3-43.
^Trom the Covenant to the Revival,” in The Shaping of American
Ward SnUtil aild A * Jamison, eds., (Princeton,
INTRODUCTION 41
pect of the Revolutionary experience that had largely eluded
earlier historians: the extent to which the reactions of Americans
to British measures had been accompanied and conditioned by an
uneasy sense that it was not just British degeneracy but their own
corruption that was responsible for their difficulties. Arguing that
the American response to the Revolution "in all its phases” "was
affected” by a group of inherited beliefs in industry, frugality,
and simplicity which he called, for convenience, the Puritan ethic,
Morgan showed how the widespread fear that British measures
were a threat to those values both increased the intensity of the
resistance movement and, ultimately, helped to persuade Ameri¬
cans that British persistence in such measures was a sure indi¬
cation that "the British government had fallen into the hands of a
luxurious and corrupt ruling class” and that the only way to pre¬
serve American virtue was to sever all connection with Britain.
Equally important, however, Morgan suggested both that the
colonists, "always uncomfortable in the presence of prosperity,”
were afraid that the rapid increase in colonial wealth during the
eighteenth century had by encouraging idleness, extravagance,
and luxury led to a precipitous decline in the old values and
that these fears gave added impetus and meaning to the nonim¬
portation and nonconsumption agreements employed by the colo¬
nists as weapons against British policy at various times between
1765 and 1776. Those agreements, Morgan pointed out, were seen
not simply as a means of forcing the British government to re¬
peal the measures in dispute but also of restoring American virtue.
By removing the temptations to luxurious living represented by
British imports and requiring "self-denial and industry” on the
part of all colonials, those agreements, it was expected, would
force the colonists to return to the old values and arrest the moral
decay that was threatening the colonies with internal ruin. Par¬
liamentary taxation” was thus conceived of as "both a danger to
be resisted and an act of providence to recall Americans from
declension.”
How these same fears of moral and spiritual decline affected
and were revealed by the American reaction to the outbreak of
fighting in 1775 was explained by Miller. Analyzing the religious
ritual that became so manifestly a part of the Revolutionary proc¬
ess imm ediately after Lexington and Concord, Miller discovered a
deep concern over the spiritual health of the colonists and a
marked tendency to interpret the British government and the
British army as the agencies of God’s punishment for colonial sin.
Receiving wide expression in public sermons in 1775-1776, as
42 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
well as later in the war, this concern was behind the days of
humiliation and prayer set aside by Congress and the local govern¬
ments and was revealed through the application of the traditional
Protestant philosophy of the jeremiad. That philosophy assumed
both that “the sins of individuals brought calamity upon the com¬
monwealth” and that humiliation before God, an acknowledgment
of sin, and a sincere resolution “not only separately but in unison,
to mend their ways, restore primitive piety, suppress vice, curtail
luxury” were absolutely necessary before God would intervene to
help them in removing their afflictions. The vindication of Ameri¬
can rights and privileges and the success of American arms
were thus, the clergy argued, “inextricably dependent upon a moral
renovation.” What was even more important, they realized in
applying the philosophy of the social compact that was so integral
to Protestant thought, moral renovation was equally dependent
upon immediate and vigorous action against the agencies of their
affliction. Resistance to British corruption, the clergy implied, was
the means of reviving American virtue.
Although Miller did not explore either the sources or the nature
of the social, religious, or psychological tensions that may have
been behind the sense of guilt, of moral and spiritual decline, that
gave this conventional, almost instinctual, procedure such com¬
pelling force in 1775-1 776, 72 the implication was that the crisis in
imperial relations over the previous decade had caused the
Americans to go through a process of intensive self-examination,
to become acutely aware of the vicious tendencies within them¬
selves and their societies, and to come to the conclusion that it
was not just the degeneracy of the British government and
British society that they had to fear but their own imperfect
natures and evil inclinations as well. Like Morgan, Miller thus in¬
ferred that the Revolution was an internal fight against American
corruption as well as an external war against British tyranny.
“The really effective work” of the clergy, he wrote, was therefore
“not an optimistic appeal to the rising glory of America, but their
imparting a sense of crisis by revivifying Old Testament condem¬
nations of a degenerate people”; and what gave their message
such power with the populace at large was its vivid portrayal of
die “vengeance God denounced against the wicked [and of] . . .
7hat dreary fortunes would overwhelm those who persisted in
oth.” Yet, Miller pointed out, the words of the clergy carried an
vome of the possible sources of these tensions axe discussed briefly in
to S. Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” Wil-
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXIII (January, 1966), 3-32.
INTRODUCTION 43
implicit promise as well as an explicit threat. Social regeneration
and the removal of British corruption, the successful assertion of
“native piety against foreign impiety,” would, many of the clergy
came to infer, usher in a bright new day of “prosperity and tem¬
poral happiness beyond anything the world” had hitherto ex¬
perienced.
Alan Heimert explored the religious aspects of the Revolution
in far greater detail and over a much longer period in Religion
and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revo¬
lution.™ An analysis of the intellectual divergence between “Lib¬
eral” (Arminian/Old Light) and Calvinist religious leaders that
grew out of the Great Awakening and of their contrasting re¬
sponses to the debate with Britain after 1763 convinced Heimert
that the evangelical Calvinist followers of Jonathan Edwards were
far more deserving of the title “spokesmen of rebellion 7 than the
Liberals for whom it had usually been reserved. The elitist social
ideology and the fear of mass popular uprisings manifested by
the Liberals made them, Heimert argued, at best only timid revo¬
lutionaries, while the millenarian aspects of Calvinist thought
the hope for the establishment of a more affectionate union of
Christians and the gradual restoration of the influences of the
holy spirit in America—gave it a radical posture that made it far
more congenial to the underlying thrust of the Revolution. Already
in the habit of contrasting the corruption of the Old World with
the promise of the New in the years before 1763, Calvinist clergy¬
men were among the earliest and most persistent exponents of
the theme that the degeneracy of Britain was responsible for and
gave coherence to the various measures Americans found o
jectionable in the 1760’s and 1770’s; and for them resistance to
Britain became the means not only to escape the seductive influ¬
ences of British depravity and to secure the blessings of liberty
for America, but also to revitalize “what for thirty and more years
had been the social [and religious] goals of the evangelical
scheme.” By calling forth a vigorous exertion of will on behait ot
liberty, by inspiring “sinners to oppose sin,’ the Revolution, the
Calvinists hoped, would serve as the instrument for forging a
spiritual union among the American people, “exorcising from
America, not merely sinners, but the sinful spirit of selfishness
itself,” and thus initiating that moral revolution “within men that
would lead irresistibly to the creation of the “earthly Kingdom^ ot
the Calvinist Messiah” in America. Like Miller, Heimert thus
«cambridge, Mass., 1966.
44 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
stressed that the spirit of 1775—1776 was "not universally one of
moderation and calculated assessment of political privileges and
rights.” For the Calvinists, at least, the Revolution was "not so
much the result of reasoned thought as an emotional outburst
similar to a religious revival.” Like both Miller and Morgan,
Heimert pointed out the intensely introspective side to the Cal¬
vinist’s response to the Revolution. Beneath his "zealous opposition
to tyranny,” Heimert declared, 'lay an anxious awareness that,
were something not done to change the course of history, the
American character, his own included, might well not prove to be
completely different from that of the British tyrant whom he
opposed.”
These studies of the psychology of American resistance have
added several new dimensions to our understanding of the colonial
reaction to British policy after 1763. First, they have shifted the
focus from the ostensible to the underlying issues in the dispute
by making fully explicit what, in the several investigations of sub¬
stantive grievances, had been largely only implicit: that it was
not only the desire to preserve their traditional rights and privi¬
leges against attacks by the imperial government but also the fear
of what might happen to them once those bulwarks against ar¬
bitrary power had been removed that drove the colonists to revolt.
Secondly, they have traced the origins of this fear directly to the
colonists’ conception of human nature with its strong sense of
man’s imperfections and especially of his inability to resist the
corrupt influences of power. Thirdly, they have shown that that
conception derived both, as Bailyn has argued, from a long philo¬
sophical tradition which came to the colonists largely through the
writings of British dissenters and, as Morgan, Miller, and Heimert
have suggested, from experiential roots. From their individual and
collective experience the colonists understood how frail and po¬
tentially evil man was, and their deep-seated anxieties about the
state of individual and social morality within the colonies helped
to sharpen and shape their response to and was in turn heightened
by the several manifestations of what they took to be corruption
and the corrosive effects of power on the part of the imperial gov¬
ernment. Finally, on the basis of these conclusions it becomes
much clearer why the colonists had such an exaggerated reaction
tc what, in retrospect, appear to have been no more than a series
>f justifiable and not very sinister actions by the parent state and
by they so grossly misunderstood the motives and behavior of
ministry and Parliament and insisted upon interpreting every
sure they found objectionable as part of a malign conspiracy
INTRODUCTION 45
of power against colonial, and ultimately all British, liberty. From
the perspective of these studies, then, the Revolution has become
on the part of the Americans not merely a struggle to preserve the
formal safeguards of liberty against flagrant violations by the
British but, in a deeper sense, a moral crusade against British
corruption, a crusade made all the more compelling by the
American belief that only by a manly opposition to and, after
1776, a complete separation from, that corruption could they
hope to restore American virtue and save themselves from be¬
coming similarly corrupt.
The Roots of Tory and British Behavior
In their preoccupation with discovering and explaining the
nature of American discontent between 1763 and 1776, most
recent writers have neglected to give much attention to the Tory
and British side of the Revolutionary controversy. 74 This is not
to say that they have written "as partisans of the Revolutionaries”
or that, like the men of the Revolution and the nineteenth-century
patriotic historians, they have assumed either implicitly or ex¬
plicitly that the patriots were right and their antagonists wrong.
They have not, contrary to recent charges by Gordon S. Wood,
attempted "to justify the Revolution.” 75 Their findings and em¬
phases do, however, raise two important questions. If, as they
infer, the patriots stood for the maintenance of the status quo and
represented the dominant drift of colonial opinion, what can be
said of the Tories, the classic conservatives in the Revolutionary
drama? If the British government was not trying to establish a
tyranny in the colonies, as everyone now would agree, why did it
continue to pursue policies that Americans found so objectionable ?
Both of these questions have been the subject of recent study.
That the Tories were indeed only a small minority of the total
colonial population and that they were clearly out of step with
the vast majority of their compatriots have been confirmed by
the findings of two new works on loyalism. In The King s Friends.
The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claim-
74 This neglect can be explained in large part as a reaction to the writings
of the imperial historians, who, as Edmund S. Morgan suggested m 1957
(“The American Revolution: Revisions m Need of Revismg, William and
Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., XTV [January, 1957], 3-15), had gone so far in
presenting a sympathetic case for British officials that they had made it
difficult to understand why the colonists revolted.
75 “Rhetoric and Reality” op. cit. These charges are valid in the case
of the works of Dickerson and Knollenberg.
46 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ants,™ Wallace Brown concluded on the basis of a systematic
analysis of the social, economic, and geographical backgrounds of
those loyalists who submitted claims for compensation to the
British government that the total number of loyalists constituted
no more than 7.6 to 18 per cent of the total white adult popula¬
tion. Earlier writers 77 had emphasized the upper-class character of
loyalism, but Brown found that, although loyalism was a dis¬
tinctly urban and seaboard phenomenon”—except in New York
and North Carolina where there were “major rural, inland
pockets” of loyahsts—with a clear “commercial, officeholding, and
professional bias,” its adherents came from all segments of
society and represented a rough cross section of the colonial
population. Only in Massachusetts, New York, and to a lesser
degree Georgia were substantial numbers of the upper class rep¬
resented, and even in those colonies the vast majority of the upper
classes were clearly not loyalists. If, in terms of general soci
and economic background, the Tories were virtually indistinguish¬
able from the Whigs, as Brown’s investigation suggested, the
question remains exactly how they were different.
This question has been taken up by William H. Nelson in The
American Tory,™ a penetrating study that focuses on the psycho¬
logical character of the loyahsts. The key to loyalism, Nelson
argued, was weakness, weakness arising from the loyahsts in¬
herent disparateness, lack of organization, unpopular political
views, and marginal position in colonial society. Unlike their op¬
ponents, Tory leaders did not consult among themselves, never
developed a community of feeling or a common sense of purpose,
had no clear alternative to the Whig drift, and did not even know
each other. Unable to cultivate pubhc opinion, they held social
and political ideas and values that could prevail in the colonies
only with British assistance. Many, like Thomas Hutchinson, were
passive and narrowly defensive with a sense of fatality, of in¬
evitable misfortune and failure, that prevented them from taking
the offensive. Others, like Joseph Galloway, found British meas¬
ures as unacceptable as the patriots but waited until the opposi¬
tion was too far advanced for them to seize the initiative. Simi¬
larly, rank and file Tories were concentrated among non-English
md religious minorities and among people in peripheral ^areas,
-egions already in decline, or not yet risen to importance” such
•ovidence, 1966. , _
■it notably, Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revo-
(New York and London, 1902).
3 rd, England, 1961.
INTRODUCTION 47
as the western frontier and the maritime region of the middle
colonies, and represented a series of conscious minorities who
looked to Britain for support against an external enemy like the
Indians or the dominant majority. It was weakness, then. Nelson
argued, along with alienation from or suspicion of the prevailing
Whig majority, and not simple loyalty, that tied the Tories to
Britain and, he implied, was responsible for their choice after
the Declaration of Independence. Nelson's conclusions were sec¬
onded both by Brown, who suggested that most loyalists “had, or
thought they had, something material and spiritual to lose from
the break with Britain,” and by Douglass Adair and John Schutz
in their introduction to Peter Oliver?s Origin & Progress of the
American Rebellion: A Tory View,™ where they explained that
Oliver's loyalism was in part attributable to his inability “to adapt
himself to the fast-changing events of American life after 1760.”
If the work on American grievances did not imply that the
British politicians were in the wrong, it did suggest strongly that
they seriously misjudged the situation in the colonies at almost
every point between 1763 and 1783 and that, if the preservation
of the empire was one of their primary objectives, they blundered
badly. If, as imperial historians have argued, the measures of the
imperial government were wise, just, and well calculated to serve
the interests of the empire as a whole, imperial authorities failed
utterly to persuade the colonists of the fact. How this breakdown
in understanding could have occurred in a political community
so celebrated for its political genius has been partially explained
by Sir Lewis Namier in his exhaustive analyses of British politics
during the opening years of the reign of George III 80 and by other
scholars in a number of studies working out the implications of
his work. 81 A long line of earlier historians from Horace Walpole
T9 San Marino, Calif., 1961.
«T he Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (2 vols., Lon¬
don, 1929); England in the Age of the American Revolution (London,
1930); and Crossroads of Power: Essays on Eighteenth Century England
(London, 1962). _ _ v .
s*The most important among these studies are Richard Pares, King
George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), a general discussion of the
politics of the reign in the light of Namier's conclusions; John Brooke, i he
Chatham Administration, 1766-1768 (London, 1956), zmd lanjl. Christie,
The End of North’s Ministry, 1780-1782 (London, 1958), two detailed
studies of the structure and course of British politics during nnportan
segments of the Revolutionary years; Charles R. Ritcheson, British Politics
and the American Revolution (Norman, Okla., 1954), a narrative of the
impact of the American troubles upon British poetics; and Enc ltobson,
The American Revolution in its Political and Military Aspects, 17bd 17 od
(London, 1955), a collection of interpretive essays.
48 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to Sir George Trevelyan had charged George III with attempting
to destroy the influence of the Whig oligarchy and reestablish the
supremacy of the Crown over Parliament. The King's American
program, they had suggested, was part of the same pattern, and
the English Whigs and the Americans were aligned against a
common enemy in a common struggle against tyranny. Had the
Whig party been in power, the argument ran, it would have pur¬
sued a more conciliatory course and prevented the Revolution.
Namier and his followers have sharply challenged this inter¬
pretation at every point. They have argued that there were no
parties in the modem sense, only loosely organized factions and
family groups; that what mattered most in politics was not
ideology or the attachment to principle but the struggle for office,
power, and advantage; that political issues revolved about local
rather than national or imperial considerations; that the "political
nation”—the people who took some active role in politics—was
largely restricted to a narrow elite in the middle and upper eche¬
lons of British social structure; that all groups, as well as the
King, accepted the traditional Whig principles that had evolved
out of the revolutionary settlement; and that George III did not
have to subvert the constitution to gain control over Parliament
because, as in the case of his predecessor and grandfather, George
II, his power to choose his own ministers and his control over
patronage assured him of considerable influence in determining
Parliament's decisions. 82
What these conclusions mean in terms of the misunderstanding
with the colonies, though no one has worked them out in detail,
is fairly clear. They reinforce the suggestions of the students of
American grievances that British policy was shortsighted and
inept. If British political leaders were so preoccupied by the strug¬
gle for office and so deeply involved in local matters, it is not
difficult to see why they were unable to take a broader view in
dealing with the colonies. The engrossment of the ministers and
the leaders of Parliament in internal British politics and, prior to
1770, the frequent changes in administration meant, as several
recent books have shown, 83 that much of the responsibility for
“Namier’s conclusions have been challenged by Herbert Butterfield,
George III and the Historians (London, 1957), and others on the grounds
that they do not give sufficient weight to the role of ideas and present too
atomistic a view of British politics. One of the best replies to Namier’s
critics is Jacob M. Price, “Party, Purpose and Pattern: Sir Lewis Namier
and His Critics,” Journal of British Studies, I (November, 1961), 71-93.
“Especially Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury: Colonial
Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1960); Franklin
B. Wickwire, British Subministers and Colonial America, 1763-1783 (Prince¬
ton, 1966); Sosin, op. cit.; and Shy, op. cit.
INTRODUCTION 49
shaping the details of colonial policy devolved upon the bureauc¬
racy, second-line officials in the Treasury, Board of Trade, Ameri¬
can Department, and Law Offices who remained in office despite
shifts in administration. In Agents and Merchants: British Colonial
Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763-1775**
Jack M. Sosin has demonstrated that colonial agents and mer¬
chants concerned in the colonial trade operated as a kind of rudi¬
mentary lobby to present the views of the colonists and actually
managed to secure several important concessions from the govern¬
ment. But the agents themselves, and certainly not the merchants,
did not always have accurate and up-to-date information about the
situation in the colonies and, in any case, most colonial informa¬
tion came to the bureaucracy either from British officials in^ the
colonies, most of whom were unsympathetic to the American
cause, or from self-styled experts in both Britain and the colonies
who, as John Shy has remarked, often “had some ax to grind or
private interest to serve.” There was, in short, no sure way for
colonial officials to obtain a clear and undistorted version o
American views, and this absence of effective channels of com¬
munication could lead only to a massive breakdown m understand¬
ing in a crisis such as the one that developed after 1773.
Even more important in inhibiting effective action by imperial
officials, still other studies have indicated, were their preconcep¬
tions about what colonies were and ought to be. Reinforced by the
association in the official mind of the opposition m the colonies
with the radical and, to many members of the British political
nation, profoundly disturbing Wilkite agitation in Britain,^ those
preconceptions, according to recent investigations of four of e
key figures in British politics—'Townshend, Shelburne, Dartmouth,
and Germain 86 —were of the utmost importance in shaping the
responses of individuals of every political stripe to the imperial
crisis. Similarly, Bernard Donoughue 87 has demonstrated how
severely those preconceptions limited the range of choices open to
^he C °n^e eb aid 19 Sact of this agitation has recently been analyzedl in
Ta „ P S e wZ Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform
Movement in British Politics :1760-1785 L
a*£s i u “>j
John Norris, Shelburne and Reform (London, 1963); B. D. Bargar^or
Dartmouth and the American Revolution (Columbia, 1965), and GeraL
Saxon Brown, The American Secretary: The Colonial Policy of Lord George
Germain , 1775—1778 (Ann Arbor, 1963). p„th to War 1773-
e’British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to war n
75 (London, 1964).
5° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the government in the critical period between the Boston Tea Party
in December, 1773 and the outbreak of war in April, 1775. No
one either in or out of office, Donoughue found, was able to
escape from the oppressive weight of dominant ideas and habits
of thinking and to grapple with the possibility that, as Americans
were insisting, the empire might be preserved without totally sub¬
ordinating the colonies to Parliament. The traditional explanation
for this failure has been that the men in power lacked vision,
magnanimity, and statesmanship. But Donoughue’s work pointed
to more than a mere series of individual weaknesses. If men
could not go beyond the prescribed boundaries of thought and
language within which the system required them to work, then
perhaps the system itself was incapable of adjustment at that time
and the old British Empire may have been less the victim of the
men who presided over its dissolution than they were the victims
of the system of which the empire was a part. Given his commit¬
ment to the revolutionary settlement and to the supremacy of
Parliament, George III could not possibly have stood apart from
Parliament as a royal symbol of imperii union as the colonists
desired. 88
Revolutionary Consequences
The net effect of the new studies of the coming of the Revolu¬
tion has been to reestablish the image of the Revolution as a con¬
servative protest movement against what appeared to the men of
the Revolution to have been an unconstitutional and vicious as¬
sault upon American liberty and property by a tyrannical and cor¬
rupt British government. The Revolution, Daniel J. Boorstin
argued in The Genius of American Politics, 89 had now to be
understood as “a victory of constitutionalism.” The major issue
was “the true constitution of the British Empire,” and because the
leaders of the Revolution regarded it as an “affirmation of faith in
ancient British institutions,” the “greater part of the institutional
life of the community . . . required no basic change.” To Boorstin
the Revolution thus appeared a conservative and “prudential
decision taken by men of principle,” remarkable chiefly because
88 A more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the implications of
recent ■writings on British politics in the eighteenth century for the under¬
standing of the Revolution will he found in Jack P. Greene, "The Plunge
of Lemmings: A Consideration of Recent Writings on British Politics and
the American Revolution” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXVH (Winter, 1968),
141-175.
^Chicago, 1953.
INTRODUCTION 51
“in the modem European sense of the word, it was hardly a
revolution at all.”
Recent investigations of the concrete political and social changes
that accompanied the Revolution have tended to reinforce this
image. Detailed studies of the political development of three
states after 1776 have indicated that there was virtually no change
in the traditional patterns of political leadership and little identi¬
fiable interest among any segment of society in achieving a more
democratic polity. In a careful examination of Maryland, 90 Philip
A. Crowl found that after 1776 “a relatively small class of planters,
lawyers, and merchants” dominated the politics of that state with¬
out serious challenge from below, just as it had throughout the
late colonial period. There was plenty of political conflict in Mary¬
land, much of it over hard economic issues, and a bitter struggle
over the emission of cheap paper money in 1785—1787 saw debtors
aligned against creditors. But the conflict was not along class
lines—the debtors were mostly from the upper classes and had
few democratic overtones. Rather, it consisted of a series of battles
over opposing interests, ideas, and personalities between ad hoc
coalitions of opposing groups of leading men. Richard P. McCor¬
mick 91 and John A. Munroe 92 reached similar conclusions about
New Jersey and Delaware. “Men of interest loosely organized
into two broad factions deriving from long-standing sectional divi¬
sions peculiar to each state played the preponderant role in politics
without interference from or unrest among the lower classes.
These factions took opposing sides on a variety of issues, including
the issuance of more paper money, but democracy per se was not
an overt issue. 93
By contrast, as Robert J. Taylor has shown, 94 the Revolution
seems to have served as a much more profound educative and
democratizing force among the people of western Massachusetts.
Traditionally conservative and deeply suspicious of the commer¬
cial east, the westerners were slow in joining the easterners in op¬
posing the British, but once they had thrown in their lot with the
00 Maryland During and After the Revolution: A Political and Economic
Study (Baltimore, 1943). „ ... 7 D
01 Exp eriment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period , 17oi
1789 (New Brunswick, 1953).
62 Federalist Delaware , 1775-1815 (New Brunswick, 1954). ^
^Similarly, Oscar and Mary Handlin found in a survey of Massachusetts
politics (“Radicals and Conservatives in Massachusetts after Independence,
New England Quarterly , XVH [September, 1944], 343-355) that there were
not two stable parties, one radical and the other conservative, but a senes
of shifting alliances that showed little ideological continuity.
^Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, 1954).
52 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
patriot cause they took the Revolutionary doctrine of popular
sovereignty very seriously. In normal situations they were content
to leave political leadership where it had always been—in the
hands of local gentry. There were unmistakable signs, however,
that the people at large now expected to play an expanded role in
the polity. Between 1776 and 1780 they were among the most
militant supporters of the demand for a state constitution written
by a specially-elected convention representing the sovereign au¬
thority of the people and then ratified by the people, and the
unrest which began in 1781 and culminated in 1786 in Shays’
Rebellion dramatically revealed similar tendencies. The unrest
was primarily the result of deteriorating economic conditions and
was oriented largely toward economic ends, but the fact that west-
em demands for a more equitable tax system and debtor relief
were couched in the language of popular sovereignty and made
through conventions called by the people on the basis of their
"natural right to . . . revise the fundamental law when it became
oppressive” served notice that at least in that comer of the new
United States the contest with Britain had been accompanied by
a potentially powerful revolution in the political expectations of
ordinary citizens, a revolution that, to the profound disturbance
of political leaders up and down the Atlantic seaboard, might
ultimately spread to other regions and other states.
This revolution in expectations did not, however, proceed very
far during the period of the Revolution. As Elisha Douglas showed
in Rebels and Democrats® 5 a study of the process of constitution¬
making in the states, the internal political revolution that, accord-
ing to the Progressive historians, had occurred in 1776 was a very
modest revolution indeed. There was, Douglass found, an articu-
late, if not very large, group of "democrats” who viewed the Revo¬
lution not as an end in itself but as a means to rebuild society
on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and to that
end they demanded "equal rights for all adult males and a gov¬
ernment in which the will of the majority of citizens would be the
ultimate authority for political decision.” Ardently opposed, how-
ever, by the dominant Whig leaders, who were suspicious of
democracy and wanted governments that would check majority
rule and retain the traditional system of political leadership, the
democrats scored only limited gains in just three states—North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts—and even in those
states they were unable to gain permanent control. A more subtle
“Chapdl Hill, N.C., 1955.
INTRODUCTION 53
and, ultimately, more important democratizing force was the
increase in popular participation in politics described by Jackson
Turner Main. 96 By opening up a large number of new political
opportunities, the Revolution drew an increasingly greater number
of ordinary citizens into politics with the result. Main found, that
the social base of both the upper and lower houses of the legisla¬
ture was much broader after 1776 than it had been in the late
colonial period. This development did not, however, lead to either
a wholesale turnover in political leadership or immediate repudia¬
tion of the ideals of upper-class leadership. Along with the new
ideology of popular government fashioned by some of the demo¬
crats and described by Douglass and Merrill Jensen, 97 it never¬
theless did help to pave the way for the eventual breakdown of the
old habits of deference, the ascendency of the belief in a more pop¬
ular government, and the veneration of majority rule in the early
part of the nineteenth century. 98 Although the Revolution con¬
tained some powerful democratic tendencies, then, all of these
studies seemed to indicate, it was fundamentally, at least insofar
as it affected internal politics, an elitist movement with only a
modest amount of explicit striving among either the people at
large or any of the dominant political factions for a wider diffu¬
sion of political power.
Although more work remains to be done before firm conclu¬
sions can be drawn, it also seems clear, as Frederick B. Tolies
noted in a 1954 survey of recent studies, 99 that the concrete social
changes emphasized by Jameson were less sweeping and less
significant than he had thought. Louis Hartz presented the most
elaborate statement of this theme in The Liberal Tradition in
America A 00 Taking for his text Tocquevilles observation that the
great advantage of Americans lay in the fact that they did not
have to “endure a democratic revolution,” Hartz argued that 4 the
outstanding thing about the American effort of 1776 was . . . not
"“Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democra¬
tization of the Legislatures,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXIII
(July, 1966), 391-407, and “Social Origins of a Political Elite: The Upper
House in the Revolutionary Era,” Huntington Library Quarterly, XXVII
(February, 1964), 147-158.
"“Democracy and the American Revolution,” ibid., XX (August, 1957),
321-341.
"In this connection see especially David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution
of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian
Democracy (New York, 1965).
"“The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Re-
Evaluation,” American Historical Review, LX (October, 1954), 1—12.
100 New York, 1955.
54 BE INTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the freedom to which it led, but the established feudal structure
it did not have to destroy.” Living in “the freest society in the
world” in 1776 and taking for granted the continued “reality of
atomistic social freedom,” the Americans, unlike revolutionaries
elsewhere, did not have to destroy an ancient regime. The relics
of feudalism abolished during the Revolution were just that, relics
with no necessary social function, and the success and nature of
the Revolution—its “outright conservatism”—were, Hartz insisted,
directly attributable to “the social goals it did not need to achieve.”
The prevailing view thus came to be that the Revolution was
predominantly a conservative Whiggish movement undertaken
in defense of American liberty and property, preoccupied through¬
out with constitutional and political problems, carried on with a
minimum of violence—at least when seen in the perspective of
other revolutions—and with little change either in the distribu¬
tion of political power or in the structure and operation of basic
social institutions, and reaching its logical culmination with the
Federal Constitution. Whatever democratic stirrings may have ac¬
companied it were subordinate and incidental to the main thrust
of events and to the central concerns of its leaders. 101 As Benjamin
Fletcher Wright insisted, 102 the Spirit of ’76 seemed to be repre¬
sented less accurately by the writings of Thomas Paine—whose
ideas, as Cecelia M. Kenyon has shown, 103 were decidedly atypical
of the dominant patterns of thought among American Revolu¬
tionary leaders—or even the Declaration of Independence than by
the state constitutions of 1776, 1777, and 1780, constitutions
which were shaped out of traditional materials and revealed the
commitment of the men of the Revolution to “order and stability
as well as liberty,” to the ancient British concept that "liberty re¬
quired constitutional order.” This continuity between the new
and the old as well as the amazing “consensus on political and
constitutional principles” represented both in the state constitu-
M TMs view appears with some variations in most general treatments of
the Revolution published in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. See, for example,
John R. Alden, The American Revolution, 1775—1783 (New York, 1954);
Robert E. Brown, “Reinterpretation of the Revolution and Constitution,”
Social Education, XXI (March, 1957), 102—105, 114, and Reinterpretation
of the Formation of the American Constitution (Boston, 1963); Richard
B. Morris, The American Revolution: A Short History (New York, 1955),
“Class Struggle and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd ser., XIX (January, 1962), 3—39, and The American Revolution Recon¬
sidered (New York, 1967); and Esmond Wright, Fabric of Freedom, 1763-
1800 (New York, 1961).
102 Consensus and Continuity, 1776—1787 (Boston, 1958).
103 * I Where Paine Went Wrong,” American Political Science Review, XLV
(December, 1951), 1086-1099.
INTRODUCTION 55
tions and the Federal Constitution of 1787, Wright argued, cast
far more light upon the nature of the American Revolution than
the rather narrow range of conflict and disagreement or the rela¬
tively minor elements of discontinuity in the Revolutionary ex¬
perience.
The Revolution, in short, came to be viewed largely from the
perspective of the dominant Whig elite which, with very few ex¬
ceptions, had managed to retain control of political life as well as
the confidence of the public throughout the period from 1763 to
1789. The urban mobs and rural populists who so thoroughly
fired the imagination of the Progressive historians, according to
the new interpretation, for the most part played only supporting
parts in the drama of the Revolution, however important the roles
they were in the process of creating came to be on the American
political stage after 1789. Political conflict thus no longer seemed
to have been among classes or discrete and “naturally” antagonis¬
tic social and economic groups but among rival elements within
the elite which competed against one another within a broad
ideological consensus not so much over issues as for power and
advantage. To be sure, the Revolution was accompanied, as Ed¬
mund S. Morgan has indicated in his masterful survey of the
whole period, 104 by a creative search for principles first to defend
American constitutional rights and then to build a new nation, but
the search, at least during the years of the Revolution, was dis¬
tinctly less radical in its results than earlier historians had as-
sumed.
This overwhelming stress upon the defensive and preservative
character of the Revolution tended to divert attention from any
revolutionary or radical implications that may have accompanied
it, and not until the early 1960’s did a few scholars set out to dis¬
cover and explain just what was actually revolutionary about the
Revolution. The most systematic and thorough exploration of this
theme was by Bernard Bailyn in “Political Experience and Enlight¬
enment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Histor¬
ical Review, LXVII (January, 1962), 339-351, and The Ideological
Origins of the American Revolution. What “endowed the Revolu¬
tion with its peculiar force and made of it a transforming event,
Bailyn declared, was not the “overthrow of the existing order”—
which nowhere occurred—but the “radical idealization and^ ra¬
tionalization of the previous century and a half of American
experience.” Many of the social and political goals of the European
w* Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (Chicago, 1956).
56 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Enlightenment, Bailyn pointed out, had already “developed na¬
turally, spontaneously, early in the history of the American colo¬
nies, and they existed as simple matters of social and political
fact on the eve of the Revolution.” Because habits of mind and
traditional ways of thinking lagged far behind these fundamental
changes in the nature of colonial social and political life, however,
there was on the eve of the Revolutionary debate a sharp “di¬
vergence between habits of mind and belief on one hand and ex¬
perience and behavior on the other.” By requiring a critical prob-
ing of traditional concepts and forcing the colonists to rationalize
and explain their experience—“to complete, formalize, systematize,
and symbolize what previously had been only partially realized,
confused, and disputed matters of fact”—the Revolution helped to
end this divergency. Most of the political ideas that emerged from
this process—the conceptions of representative bodies as mirrors
of their constituents, of human rights as existing above and limit-
ing the law, of constitutions as ideal designs of government, and
of sovereignty as divisible—were at once expressive of conditions
that had long existed in the colonies and a basic reconception of
the traditional notions about the “fundamentals of government
and of society’s relation to government.” By “lifting into conscious¬
ness and endowing with high moral purpose” these “inchoate, con¬
fused elements of social and political change,” the Revolution ary
debate thus both released social and political forces that had long
existed in the colonies and “vastly increased their power.” The
movement of thought quickly spilled over into other areas, and
the institution of chattel slavery, the principle of the establish¬
ment of religion, and even conventional assumptions about the
social basis of politics and the constitutional arrangements that
followed from those assumptions were called into question. Ulti¬
mately, in the decades after the Revolution, these “changes in the
realm of belief and attitude” and, more especially, the defiance of
traditional order and distrust of authority contained within them
affected the very “essentials” of American social organization and,
Bailyn pointed out, helped permanently to transform the nature
of American life.
Although Cecelia M. Kenyon 105 insisted that independence and
the creation and adoption of the Constitution of 1787 were gen¬
uinely radical results of the Revolution, the two other conse¬
quences that she singled out as radical—the establishment of
105 “Republicanism and Radicalism in the American Revolution: An Old-
Fashioned Interpretation,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., XIX (April
1962), 153-182. ’
INTRODUCTION 57
republicanism and the “crystallization of the individualism and
equalitarianism of the Declaration of Independence into an opera¬
tive as well as a formal political philosophy”—also fell largely
within the realm of ideas. What was so remarkable and so inno¬
vative about the former, she observed, was not the formal institu¬
tion of republican government, which was accomplished with
ease and brought no pervasive or “fundamental changes, either in
private or public life,” but the sudden development among Amer¬
icans, who only a short time before had been committed mon¬
archists, of a deep “ideological attachment to republicanism” and
the association in the public mind of “all the characteristics of
good government with republicanism, and with republicanism
only.” Far more innovative, she argued, was the radical individual¬
ism, the “political and ethical egoism,” which was central to the
developing philosophy of the Revolution and was symbolized by
the substitution in the Declaration of Independence of “the pursuit
of happiness for property” in the traditional trilogy of inviolable
rights. Because happiness was “a subjective goal dependent^ on
individual interpretation,’ it was, as an end of government, “far
more individualistic” than the protection of property and neces¬
sarily strongly equalitarian in its implications. Clearly, no in¬
dividual could decide for another what would promote his hap¬
piness, and, as Kenyon pointed out, if all men had by nature an
equal right to the pursuit of happiness, it followed ‘logically that
every man should have a voice in the determination of public
policy.” Although this philosophy of radical individualism was a
clear invitation to political relativism and to the acceptance,
even idealization, of the pursuit of self-interest as a legitimate
form of behavior to be protected, even encouraged, by govern¬
ment, its full effect, Kenyon emphasized, was not realized until
well after the Revolutionary era because the men of the Revolu¬
tion, despite the individualistic trend of their thought, continued
to think in terms of an objective common good and ‘to deplore
man’s tendency toward self-interest and bias.
Alan Heimert similarly emphasized the radical thrust of the
thought of the Revolution in Religion and the American Mind.
The double focus of the Calvinist Revolutionary crusade he noted
the emphasis upon both securing the benefits of liberty and
achieving an affectionate Christian union free of invidious social
and political distinctions, had a millenarian character that made
it a potentially “highly radical political movement. ^Revolu¬
tion was expected to inaugurate the moral renovation of m ,
and once that renovation was under way, Calvinists implied,
58 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
government that badge of lost innocence and symbol of man’s
corruption—could be placed more directly in the hands of the
people, who in turn would "persevere in the Christian warfare until
all despots, great and petty, had been overthrown.” Perhaps be¬
cause the Calvinist did not, in general, speak for "the more re¬
spectable and presumably . . . most powerful elements of colonial
society, who, as other writers have shown, retained control of
American political life, this movement did not, however, make
much headway during the Revolution.
If, then, as most recent writers have indicated, the Revolution
was at its center a fundamentally conservative movement con¬
cerned primarily with the preservation of American liberty and
property, it also had some distinctly radical features, as the works
of Bailyn, Kenyon, and Heimert make clear. Its radicalism was to
be found, however, less in the relatively modest social and political
changes that accompanied it than in the power of its ideas. Some
of the immediate and tangible results of the workings of those
ideas during the Revolutionary era were discussed by Bailyn and
Kenyon. R. R. Palmer 106 has emphasized another. From the broad
perspective of general Western European political development.
Palmer argued, the "most distinctive work of the Revolution” and
its most novel institutional achievement was in devising an insti¬
tution the constitutional convention—through which the people
could in practice, and not just in theory, exercise their sovereign
power to constitute their own governments. Used for the first time
in preparing the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the con¬
vention chosen solely for the purpose of writing a constitution,
with the ancillary device of popular ratification of its work, was
institutionalized with the Federal Constitution of 1787 and has
since served as a model for much of the rest of the world. But
the full impact of the radical ideas of the Revolution, their com-
Plete expression in the institutions and values of American life,
Heimert, Bailyn, and Kenyon all seemed to agree, came not during
the Revolution but over the next half century in the political move¬
ments associated with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
Thus, as William H. Nelson remarked in another essay on "The
Revolutionary Character of the American Revolution ,” 10 7 even "if
the American revolutionists did not fight for democracy, they
contributed to its coming . . . because their individualistic con-
"TJie Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe
an $L ^ meru:a ’ 1760—1800, Volume One: The Challenge (Princeton 1959)
im Arnerican Historical Review , LXX (July, 1965), 998-1014.
INTRODUCTION 59
cepts of government by consent and republican equality led ir¬
resistibly in a democratic direction.”
The Federal Constitution
The forces for and against the movement for a stronger central
government in the 1780's, the nature of the divisions over the
Constitution of 1787, and the relationship of the Constitution to
the Revolution have also received considerable attention over the
past quarter century. Much of this attention has been focused
upon Charles A. Beard's economic interpretation of the Constitu¬
tion, and the clear consensus has been that that interpretation is
seriously deficient in almost every respect. In separate articles
published in the early 1950's, Richard Hofstadter 108 and Douglass
Adair 109 argued that the Beard book was a Progressive tract and
showed to what a large extent his interpretation had been warped
by his inability to resist viewing eighteenth-century phenomena
through Progressive lenses. One of the most serious of the result¬
ing errors was pointed out by Edmund S. Morgan in 1957. 110 By
reading back into the Revolution the conflict between property
rights and human rights that seemed to him so fundamental to
early twentieth-century American politics, Beard and other Pro¬
gressives had completely distorted and misread the eighteenth-
century conception of liberty, which was always coupled with,
not set in opposition to, property, and thereby built their whole
account upon an anachronism. In the most devastating critique,
Robert E. Brown, on the basis of a meticulous paragraph-by-para¬
graph analysis of the Beard volume, 111 convicted Beard of rank
mishandling of his evidence.
The most ambitious analysis of the Beard thesis was presented
in 1958 by Forrest McDonald in We the People: The Economic
Origins of the Constitution. 112 After doing much of the research
Beard had said would be necessary to validate his interpretation,
McDonald was able to state categorically that Beard's “economic
interpretation of the Constitution does not work.” Far from being
308 “Beard and the Constitution: the History of an Idea,” American Quar¬
terly, II (FaU, 1950), 195-212.
io9«The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser.,
VIII (January, 1951), 48-67.
110 “American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising,” and Birth of the
Republic, op. cit.
^Charles Beard and the Constitution (Princeton, 1956).
^Chicago, 1958.
60 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
as unrepresentative of the American electorate as Beard had in¬
ferred, the Philadelphia Convention, McDonald argued, “consti¬
tuted an almost complete cross-section of the geographical areas”
and organized political interest groups “existing in the United
States in 1787.” Thirty-nine of fifty-five major geographical areas
and thirty-one of thirty-four major political factions from twelve
of the thirteen states were represented. Neither did the delegates
compose a “consolidated economic group” nor did “substantial
personalty interests” provide the dynamic element in the move¬
ment for the Constitution, as Beard had argued. In both federal
and state conventions the amount of real property in land and
slaves held by the proponents of the Constitution far exceeded the
value of their holdings in public securities and other forms of
personal property, wealth in both personal and real property was
substantially represented among both Federalists and Antifederal¬
ists, and in “no state was the Constitution ratified without the
consent of the farmers and a majority of the friends of paper
money.” Indeed, McDonald implied, such broad categories as those
employed by Beard—real property versus personal property, com¬
merce versus agriculture, creditors versus debtors, lower classes
versus upper classes—were virtually meaningless when applied to
the struggle over the Constitution. With at least six basic forms of
capital and “twenty basic occupational groups having distinctly
different economic characteristics and needs,” there were, obvi¬
ously, so many diverse and conflicting interests that it was im¬
possible, McDonald concluded, to devise a single set of polar
classifications that would adequately explain the alignment over
the Constitution.
Although in We the People McDonald was primarily concerned
with clearing the decks so that he could subsequently write “some¬
thing meaningful about the making of the Constitution” without
constantly stopping to do battle with Beard, the thrust of the book
was by no means entirely negative. Scattered throughout the text
and in three concluding chapters were conclusions and hypotheses
that indicated what McDonald considered the central elements in
a more plausible economic interpretation of the Constitution. The
whole story, he implied, could be told entirely without reference
to class conflict and the struggle for democracy—the two themes
that had received most emphasis from Progressive historians. Not
class but state, sectional, group, and individual interests and the
complex interplay among them comprised the economic forces be¬
hind the Constitution. Any economic interpretation of the Consti¬
tution would therefore necessarily be pluralistic, but, McDonald
INTRODUCTION 6l
indicated, the primary organizing unit would be the individual
states. Not only were the activities of most interest groups circum¬
scribed by state boundaries, but those interests that reached across
state boundaries, such as the interest in the public debt, “operated
under different conditions in the several states, and their attitudes
toward the Constitution varied with the internal conditions in their
states.” The contest over the Constitution was thus “at once a con¬
test and thirteen contests” and, McDonald suggested hi his most
important new general conclusion, the outcome in each state
seemed to depend upon how satisfied its citizens were—how well
their economic interests were being served—under the Articles of
Confederation. “Those states that had done well on their own were
inclined to desire to continue on their own,” he noted, “and those
that found it difficult to survive independently were inclined to
desire to cast their several lots with a general government.”
That McDonald had overstated his case against Beard and that
his focus upon narrow and specific interests tended to obscure the
larger, and presumably more significant, divisions over the Con¬
stitution was the argument of two formidable critics: Jackson
Turner Main and Lee Benson. Main, who had been over much of
the same material as McDonald, published a long critical analysis
of We the People 113 in which he convicted McDonald of a number
of factual errors, argued that because “there was not a single
delegate who spoke for the small farmers” the Philadelphia Con¬
vention was not as representative as McDonald had contended
and the delegates were therefore a “consolidated economic group”
representing the commercial east coast, and maintained that the
Constitution was indeed “written by large property owners and
that the division over its acceptance followed, to some extent, class
lines” as Beard had affirmed. A year later Main presented the evi¬
dence for these propositions and his own explanation of the fight
over the Constitution in his book, The Antifederalists: Critics of
the Constitution , 1781-1788. 114 In some respects Main’s conclu¬
sions, as McDonald remarked in his rebuttal, appeared to be the
same old Progressive story of the rich guys against the poor guys,
but there were significant new qualifications and shifts of em¬
phasis. Insisting that there were important ideological and eco¬
nomic differences between Federalist and Antifederalists, Main
subscribed to the traditional Progressive view that the ideological
ii3«charles A. Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Review of Forrest
McDonald's We the People with a Rebuttal by Forrest McDonald,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XVII (January, 1960), 86-110.
114 Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961.
02 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
split was between advocates of aristocracy and advocates of de¬
mocracy. He carefully pointed out, however, that not all Anti-
federalists were democrats. Most Antifederalists leaders were, in
fact, well to do and were interested less in democracy than in local
self-rule and a weak central government. These leaders, who were
the chief spokesmen for antifederalism, tended to mute the demo¬
cratic voices of rank-and-file Antifederalists, the small property
holders who were “fundamentally anti-aristocratic” and “wanted
a government dominated by the many rather than the few.” Sim¬
ilarly, Main argued that the economic division over the Constitu¬
tion was in general along class lines with small property holders
opposing large property holders, debtors against creditors, and
paper money advocates opposed to hard money supporters. As he
carefully pointed out, however, there were so many exceptions to
his general conclusion that the contest could not possibly be ex¬
plained “exclusively in terms of class conflict.” A far more impor¬
tant division, he suggested, which cut across class lines, was that
between the commercial and non-commercial regions, between
“the areas, or people, who depended on commerce, and those who
were largely self-sufficient.” Again there were important excep¬
tions, but, he maintained, this “socio-economic division based on
a geographical location” was “the most significant fact” about the
ratification struggle, “to which all else is elaboration, amplifica¬
tion, or exception.” For Main, then, class conflict and the struggle
for democracy were still significant elements in the fight over the
Constitution, though neither was nearly so important nor so clear-
cut as earlier Progressive historians had thought.
In Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Recon-
sidered, 115 Lee Benson subjected McDonald's work to a different
kind of criticism and offered his own hypotheses about the contest
over the Constitution. The primary difficulty with McDonald's
book, Benson argued, was the assumptions on which it rested.
Based upon a “crude version of economic determinism that as¬
sumes men behave primarily as members of interest groups that
keep a profit-and-loss account of their feelings and calculate the
cash value of their political actions,” McDonald’s interpretive sys¬
tem, Benson charged, was even more grossly distorting than
Beard's. That system might conceivably be applicable to the activi¬
ties of pressure groups in the normal legislative process, but it
was clearly inappropriate to the study of a national “Constitutional
revolution” like the one that occurred in 1787-1788. Such a revo-
^lencoe, HI., 1960.
INTRODUCTION 63
lution inevitably involved a conflict of ideology, and ideology,
Benson argued, was never the “direct product of self-interest
and “always cuts across the lines of interest groups.” On the as¬
sumption that “social environment and position in the American
social structure mainly determined men’s ideologies, and, in turn,
their ideologies mainly determined their opinions on the Constitu¬
tion,” Benson proposed to devise a system of interpretation based
not on narrow economic interest groups but upon broad symbolic
social groups. The principal division in this social interpretation
of the Constitution” was between “ agrarian-minded ” men and
“ commercial-minded ” men. Ostensibly, the division was over what
kind of central government the United States would have, with
the agrarian-minded favoring a government of strictly limited
powers that was close to the people and the commercial-mmded
a government that could “function as a creative, powerful instru¬
ment” for realizing broad social ends. Agrarians thus tended to be
satisfied with the Articles of Confederation while commercialists
tended to be supporters of the Constitution. But, Benson insisted
in reading back into the ratification struggle the conflict of the
1790’s over Hamiltonian finance, the real question at issue was
what in'nd of society—agrarian or commercial—the United States
would have, and the struggle over the Constitution, over whether
the central government would be weak or strong, was merely a re¬
flection of this larger ideological conflict which had been waged
with “great intensity” by the opposing groups and presumably had
been behind most political issues ever since 1776. What these
hypotheses amounted to, as Benson freely admitted, was a re¬
formulation of Beard’s thesis in broader social terms, but they also
contained two new, if also highly tentative, propositions: that
broad social environment rather than narrow economic interests
was the primary determinative force in the struggle over die Con¬
stitution and that political behavior in the 1780’s was influenced
more strongly by ideas of the Good Society than by ideas of the
G °The*controversy over Beard’s interpretation of the Constitution
had thus generated three alternative and partially contradictory
sets of hypotheses about the hard social and economic forces be¬
hind the Constitution. All three scholars were in general agree¬
ment on a number of key points: there were discemible socio^
economic divisions over the Constitution; those divisions exerted
a profound, and probably primary, influence m the struggle; there
nature and operation were enormously more complicated than
Beard had ever imagined; and whether class divisions were im-
64 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
portant or not, the contest was not a match between the haves and
t e have-nots. The dispute was mainly over which divisions were
most important and what was the precise nature of the divisions.
Ihe possibility of achieving some synthesis between Main’s “com¬
mercial and “non-commercial” categories on one hand and Ben¬
son s commercial-minded” and “agrarian-minded” on the other
was clear enough, but McDonald’s insistence that the struggle was
between strong (satisfied) states and weak (dissatisfied) states
and was shaped by the conflicting ambitions of a multitude of
special interest groups seemed completely irreconcilable with the
arguments of either Main or Benson. Clearly, as Main pointed out,
an enormous amount of work would be required before these com-
petmg propositions could be evaluated.
Some of that work has subsequently been performed by E.
James Ferguson and McDonald. In The Power of the Purse: A
History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 ,Ferguson ex¬
plored the relationship between public finance and the movement
tor constitutional reform. It was Ferguson’s thesis that the ques¬
tion of how the public debts incurred during the War for Inde¬
pen mice were to be paid, whether by the states or by Congress,
was t * ie P* vota l issue in the relations between the states and the
nascent central government during the Confederation period. On
this question the alignment was broadly the same as that Main
and Benson had seen in the struggle over the Constitution: mer¬
cantile capitalists versus agrarians. The former were “nationalists”
who favored sound money backed by specie, strong central finan¬
cial institutions, and the absolute sanctity of contracts and prop-
erty, w e the latter were localists who wanted cheap paper
money, state-oriented finance, and easy ways of discharging debts.
Seeing m the debt a lever by which they could secure the taxing
power for the Congress, the nationalists, led by Robert Morris 117
endeavored between 1780 and 1786 to vest the debt in Congress
n give Congress the taxing power to support it. But these en-
eavors ran into opposition from the advocates of state-oriented
finance, some states began to take care of the interest on the debt,
and the nationalist movement, for all practical purposes, collapsed
between 1784 and 1786. Except for the foreign debt, on which
ongress partially defaulted, the period was not critical in terms
nance, an what produced the nationalist resurgence that led
“•Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961.
by^QarTnc/L 6 ? ealt at § reater length
delphia, 1954). S ’ Rht Moms; Revolutionary Financier (Phila-
INTRODUCTION 65
to the Constitution of 1787 was not public bankruptcy and cur¬
rency depreciation but the nationalists’ "fear of social radicalism”
following the flood of paper money emissions in 1785-1786 and
Shays’ Rebellion. Though it was not entirely clear from Ferguson’s
account whether the merchants advocated a strong central govern¬
ment so that they could handle the debt or, as he seemed to sug¬
gest, the debt was simply a means of achieving the anterior goal
of a strong central government, Ferguson had demonstrated, as he
later remarked, 118 that the political goals of the nationalists were
"interwoven with economic ends, particularly the estabhshment of
a nationwide regime of sound money and contractual obligation.”
McDonald, who presented the results of his work in a paper 119
and a book-length essay 120 agreed with Ferguson that the public
debt and the public lands were the "material sinews of union,” and
served as the basis for a national economic interest which formed
around Robert Morris and provided the impetus for the movement
to give Congress the taxing power in the early 1780’s. He also
agreed that the virtual collapse of that movement in 1783-1784
did not bring economic disaster. "It was a critical moment only
for the United States as United States,” for "those who thought the
American Republic was worth creating and saving,” he wrote, but
"not for the several states or their inhabitants,” who in general
"had it better than they had ever had it before.” Where he differed
from Ferguson was on the nature of the major political align¬
ments and the central issue that divided them. The debate over
whether to augment the powers of Congress, as McDonald saw
it, only masked a deeper and much more fundamental issue—
whether the United States would be politically one nation or not;
and where individuals stood on that question depended on a num¬
ber of variables, including where they lived, whether their states
were thriving, their economic interests, and their ideological com¬
mitments. By suggesting that "accessibility to transportation—and
us Stuart Bruchey, 'The Forces Behind the Constitution: A Critical Review
of the Framework of E. James Ferguson’s The Power of the Purse with a
Rebuttal by E. James Ferguson,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIX
(July, 1962), 429-438. For consideration of other economic developments
during the Revolution see Clarence L. Ver Steeg, "The American Revolution
Considered as an Economic Movement,” Huntington Libraiy Quarterly, XX
(August, 1957), 361-372; Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the Ameri¬
can Revolutionary Era (New York, 1938); and Curtis P. Nettels, The Emer¬
gence of a National Economy, 1775—1815 (New York, 1962).
U9< The Anti-Federalists, 1781-1789,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, XLVI
(Spring, 1963), 206—214.
ia>E Pluribus Unmn: The Formation of the American Republic 1776-1790
(Boston, 1965).
66 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
through it to communication—predisposed Americans to be narrow
or broad in their loyalties, to oppose or favor the establishment of
a national government” McDonald seemed to be adopting cate¬
gories similar to those earlier used by Main and Benson, albeit
with a significant twist in emphasis—for McDonald it was the
broad-minded versus the narrow-minded, not the commercial-
minded against the agrarian-minded. But McDonald left no doubt
that in his mind this division was distinctly secondary to the inter¬
play of competing economic interests. Then, as now, McDonald
implied, the primary determinative force in American politics was
the pocketbook, the “irresistible and illimitable compulsion to get
More,” and, although the number of separate interests was vast,
the most important division, McDonald contended in an important
elaboration of his central conclusion in We the People, was be¬
tween those who thought their interests would best be served by
a strong national government and those who had a vested interest
in the continued primacy of the state governments. The behavior
of some men, however, could not, McDonald admitted, be ex¬
plained purely in terms of self-interest. Some of the Antifederalists
were republican ideologues who would have opposed the Constitu¬
tion no matter what their interests were. More important, the
Constitution was so impressive an achievement—“the miracle of
the age . . . and of all ages to come”—that the men who wrote it—
McDonald called them “giants”—obviously had to have been in¬
spired by something more than the sordid materialism that norm¬
ally characterized American politics.
McDonald’s admission that the behavior of the men who wrote
and pushed through the Constitution, as well as that of some of
their opponents, could not be explained entirely or even largely
in terms of their economic and social interests underlined the
fundamental weakness in most of the post-World War II literature
on the Confederation and Constitution. McDonald and Ferguson,
Benson and Main, have together brought an enlarged and more
precise understanding of the tangible economic and social forces
at work in the United States during the 1780’s and of their rela¬
tionship to the critical political developments of the decade. They
have, in short, succeeded remarkably well in refining Beard’s
conclusions and categories in such a way as to make them accord
much more closely with existing evidence. The very nature of
their success, however, only revealed how giant a shadow Beard
had cast, how severely constricting his influence had been, even
for scholars, like McDonald, who have specifically sought to free
themselves from his intellectual domination. In sharp contrast to
INTRODUCTION 67
recent writers on the pre-Revolutionary period, they have not, in
other words, advanced very far beyond the Progressive historians
in explaining what the ostensible and immediate political issues
and underlying assumptions were, how men of all political hues
saw and reacted to the problems of the Confederation and the
issues raised by the Constitution, and how they explained their
behavior to themselves, their contemporaries, and posterity, what¬
ever social and economic considerations may have consciously or
unconsciously helped to shape their behavior. There seems to be a
general agreement that the Constitution was a bold political stroke,
but the exact nature of that stroke, what it represented to the
people who supported and opposed it, has not been made com¬
pletely clear.
Though an enormous amount of work still needs to be done on
developments within several key states and on the relationship be¬
tween the states and Congress before the political contours of the
1780’s can be fully reconstructed, several recent writers have indi¬
cated what the m ain outlines of that reconstruction may be. Thus,
in a suggestive article,*'* 1 John P. Roche emphasized the extent to
which the Constitution was at once the product of democratic
political procedures and a reflection of the Founders’ aspirations
for the new country. The Founders, he argued, had to be under¬
stood “first and foremost” as “superb democratic politicians who
were spokesmen for “American nationalism,” a “new and compel¬
ling credo” that emerged out of the American Revolution. As they
saw it, the Philadelphia Convention was “an all-or-nothing prop¬
osition.” Either “national salvation or national impotence” would
be the result, and to achieve the former they persistently demon¬
strated a willingness to submerge “their parochial interests m
behalf of an ideal which took shape before their eyes and under
their ministrations,” an ideal that was at best a “patchwork of
compromises over structural details necessary to overcome a
variety of differences among the delegates and to make the final
document acceptable to the public at large. Far from being m
antidemocratic document, as the Progressive historians ha
claimed, Roche concluded, the Constitution was a “vivid demon¬
stration of effective democratic political action” and a clear indica¬
tion that the Founding Fathers had to operate, and were aware
they had to operate, “with great delicacy and skill in a political
cosmos full of enemies to achieve the one definitive goal—popular
ia«The Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action,” American Political
Science Review , LV (December, 1961), 799-816.
68 KEINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
approbation.” 122 Implicit in Roche's analysis was the assumption
that the Constitution, however much it may have been tailored to
fit the fancies of the public, was a striking victory for the “Amer¬
ican nationalism” represented by the men who wrote it and se¬
cured its ratification. 123
As both Jackson T. Main and, more recently, Robert Allen
Rutland 124 have suggested, it was precisely the extreme continental
nationalism of the Federalists, and the possibility that they might
have sacrificed the libertarian inheritance of the Revolution to it,
that so worried their Antifederalist opponents. To the Antifederal¬
ists the Constitution seemed not just a threat to local control and
state-centered vested interests but, at least to many diehards, an
ominous betrayal of the ideals and achievements of the Revolu¬
tion, the diabolical instrument of a counterrevolutionary con¬
spiracy against American liberty. That the Antifederalists were
correct in thinking that they smelled a conspiracy but that they
seriously misunderstood its character and intent was the con¬
clusion of Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick in ‘The Founding
Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” Political Science Quar¬
terly , LXXVI (June 1961), 181—216, a perceptive analysis of the
nature of both the divisions over the Constitution and the na¬
tionalistic aspirations of the Federalists. The Federalist conspiracy,
Elkins and McKitrick contended, was against not liberty but “par¬
ticularism and inertia,” which in the mid-1780's seemed to the
Federalists on the verge of robbing the young nation of its future
promise. Significantly younger than their opponents, many leading
Federalists, Elkins and McKitrick pointed out, had “quite literally
seen their careers launched in the Revolution.” In contrast to
most Antifederalist leaders, whose careers were already well under
way prior to 1776 and who remained largely state-oriented there-
after, the younger Federalists necessarily had been preoccupied
with putting together a continental war effort and in the process
came to “view the states collectively as a ‘country’ and to think in
continental terms.” What made them nationalists, then, what gave
them the “dedication, the force and eclat” to attempt to overcome
the urge to rest, to drift, to turn back the clock” that was repre¬
sented by the Antifederalists and seemed to have a stranglehold
on the country from 1783 to 1787, was not “any ‘distate’ for the
^Clinton Rossiter expands on this theme in 1787: The Grand Convention
(New York, 1966).
“ 3 This point was made more explicitly by Richard B. Morris, “The Con¬
federation Period and the American Historian,” William and Marv Quarterly
3rd ser., XIH (April, 1956), 139-156.
^The Ordeal of the Constitution: The AnUfederalists and the Ratification
Struggle of 1787-1788 (Norman, Old., 1966).
INTRODUCTION 69
Revolution . . . but rather their profound and growing involve¬
ment in it.” Behind “the revolutionary verve and ardor of the
Federalists, their resources of will and energy, their willingness
to scheme tirelessly, campaign everywhere, and sweat and agonize
over every vote” was this inspired vision of what the nation could
and should be. Fundamentally, then, Elkins and McKitrick con¬
cluded, the struggle was not between rival economic groups, not
between competing ideologies, not even between nationalism and
localism, but between energy and inertia, and the Constitution
was “sufficiently congenial to the underlying commitments of the
whole culture—republicanism and capitalism—that” once inertia
had been overcome and the basic object of discontent, the absence
of a Bill of Rights, removed, opposition to the new government
melted away. After a dozen years of anxiety, the men of the Revo¬
lution could be reasonably confident in 1788-1789 that “their
Revolution had been a success.” Far from trying to overturn
the Revolution, the Federalists were thus trying to bring it to a
favorable conclusion.
Beneath the political maneuvering described by Roche and
behind the desire for a more energetic government emphasized by
Elkins and McKitrick, other writers have recently demonstrated,
were certain basic ideas that were central to the state constitutions
and indeed to the whole Revolutionary experience. As A. O. Lovejoy
has shown, 125 the framers of the Constitution had not changed
their mind about human nature as a result of their experience
during the Revolution: they still “had few illusions about the
rationality of the generality of mankind.” Indeed, with the paper
money mania of 1785—1786 and Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts
fresh in their minds, they were more fearful than ever of the
“giddiness of the multitude.” To prevent social anarchy and to
guarantee the success of—even to save—the republican experi¬
ment in America from the unhappy fate it had suffered every¬
where else, 126 they were persuaded, clearly required a stable and
vigorous political system that would check such popular ex¬
cesses. 127 Yet, as Martin Diamond has indicated, 128 they were also
^Reflections on Human Nature , op. cit.
^On this point see Douglass G. Adair, “ ‘Experience Must be Our Only
Guide’: History, Democratic Theory, and the United States Constitution, in
The Reinterpretation of Early American History, Ray E. Billington, ed. (San
Marino, Calif., 1966), 129-148.
127 Am ong several excellent analyses of the relation of Shays’ Rebellion to
the movement for stronger central government see the discussion in J. R.
Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American
Republic (London, 1966).
^“Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Framers
Intent,” American Political Science Review, LIII (March, 1959), 52—68.
7° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
deeply devoted to popular government, to the idea that political
authority should be “ ‘derived from the great body of the society,
not from . . . [any] favoured class of it/ ” However considerable
were the roles of economic interests, broad social forces, the
personal and social aspirations of the Founders, or the pressures
for political compromise, the interaction between these two ideas,
between the pessimistic conception of human nature and the com¬
mitment to popular government, these writers have argued, exer-
cised a profound shaping influence upon the proceedings of the
Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Inspired, as Douglass Adair
has shown, 129 by the possibilities that politics might be reduced to
a science, they believed, in Love joy’s words, that it was entirely
possible by employing the method of counterpoise, the balancing
of harmful elements against one another, “to construct an ideal
political society out of bad human materials—to frame a rational
scheme of government, in which the general good will be realized,
without presupposing that the individuals who exercise ultimate
political power will be severally actuated in their use by rational
motives, or primarily solicitous about the general good/’ The
Framers were thus trying not just to put together a structure of
government that would be acceptable to all of the interests at the
convention and to a majority of the public at large, as Roche
argued,^ but also, as Adair remarked, to discover through a “gen¬
uinely scientific attempt . . . the ‘constant and universal prin¬
ciples’ of any republican government in regard to liberty, justice,
and stability.” 130
The central problem facing the Framers, then, was, to quote
Lovejoy again, not chiefly one of political ethics but of practical
psychology, a need not so much to preach to Americans about
what they ought to do, as to predict successfully what they would
do. That the people would behave irrationally and constantly fall
under the sway of factions devoted to their own selfish ends rather
than to the good of the public was clear enough from the fate of
all previous experiments in republican government. To moderate
the flightiness of the people and to prevent the formation of a
majority faction that would stop at nothing, even tyranny, to
“■“That P , oHt i cs Ma y Be Reduced to a Science’: David Hume James
SSt £&)%£££ FederalUt " Huntington Library Quarterly, XX
“The Founders’ quest for fame—distinction—and the importance of that
of rt,Vpwi their ^ havior “ 1787 ^ determining the character
Constitution are discussed by Adah
INTRODUCTION yi
secure its own interest, the Framers agreed, were their primary
tasks. The first task they sought to accomplish by the creation of
the Senate which, as Diamond has pointed out, was designed to
protect property against popular excesses and to provide a check
on the popular House of Representatives without in any respect
going ""beyond the limits” permitted by the "" "genuine principles
of republican government/ ” The Framers thus rejected the con¬
ventional “mixed republic,” in which the polity was divided into
separate and distinct elements and the aristocracy balanced against
the democracy, in favor of a “democratic republic,” in which the
body representing stability and moderation was not hereditary but
popularly elected, if not directly by the people, by representatives
who were elected directly by the people. To prevent the formation
of a majority faction, the Framers came up with an equally ""re¬
publican remedy,” a major intellectual breakthrough and the
peculiar insight, as Adair has demonstrated, of James Madison.
What would save the United States from the tyranny of a majority
faction and the fate of earlier republics, Madison argued in apply¬
ing to the American situation an idea suggested to him by his
reading of Scottish philosopher David Hume, was its enormous
size and the multiplicity of factions and interests that would
necessarily result from that size. With so many separate and di¬
verse interests, Madison contended, there would be no possibility
of enough of them submerging their differences and getting to¬
gether to form a majority faction. In a large republic, then, Mad¬
ison suggested, the struggle of manifold interests would operate, to
quote Diamond, as a ""safe, even energizing” force that in itself
would guarantee ‘"the safety and stability of society.”
It was their inability to accept Madison’s contentions, Cecelia
M. Kenyon has argued, 131 that constituted the chief ideological
difference between Antifederalists and Federalists. An intensive
analysis of Antifederalist writings, she argued, revealed that they
held the same pessimistic conception of human nature, with the
distrust of the masses and fear of factions implied in that concep¬
tion, as the Federalists. Far from being devoted to simple ma-
joritarianism, as earlier writers had assumed, they were afraid of
oppression from all quarters—from the people at large as well
as from corrupt factions among the upper classes. So fearful were
they of the malignant effects of power from whatever source it
emanated, that the proposed federal government would have re-
m “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representa¬
tive Government,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XII (January,
1955), 3-43.
72 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
quired “a more rigid system of separation of powers, more numer¬
ous and more effective checks and balances” to have met their
full approval. But, in fact, they were fundamentally suspicious of
any form of a truly "national” government because they were con¬
vinced both that no government with such extensive authority
could be prevented from yielding to the temptations of power and
because, unlike Madison, who thought republican government
would work only in a large state, they thought that it would never
work except in small polities where the government could be "an
exact miniature of the people.”
From the perspective of the ideas of those who favored and op¬
posed the Constitution, recent writers have thus indicated, the
Federalists were those who were committed to the notion that
politics might be reduced to a science, that Americans, despite
their imperfections, might be able to devise a workable political
mechanism for the entire United States, while the Antifederalists
so feared the incapacities of man that they had ‘little faith” in his
ability to construct a national political system which would func¬
tion efficiently and energetically and still preserve the essences of
republican government.
The Constitution has thus come to be seen not as the repudia¬
tion of the Revolution but as the fullfillment of the aspirations and
ideas of its dominant group of leaders. To the extent it was in¬
tended to check the popular excesses that had been one of the
incidental, if also entirely logical, results of the Revolution, it was
also mildly counterrevolutionary, an attempt to neutralize the
radical tendencies of thought and behavior before they threw the
young republic into a state of political and social chaos that, the
Founders believed, would perforce lead to a tyranny as objection¬
able as that they had just fought a long and bloody war to escape.
Through the Constitution and the powerful central government
it created they hoped to reassert and provide the necessary insti¬
tutional and constitutional framework for achieving the original
goals of the oposition to and subsequent break with Britain: a
stable and orderly government in which men, despite their im¬
perfections, would be free to enjoy the blessings of liberty and
the security of property that was so essential a part of those
blessings.
The Nature of the Revolution
What lay behind the manifest events, concrete issues, and mani¬
fold interests of the era of the American Revolution, what gave
INTRODUCTION 73
them shape and coherence for the men of the Revolution, scholar¬
ship over the past quarter century seems to indicate, were their
preconceptions about the nature of man and the function of gov¬
ernment. Given the intense preoccupation of American leaders,
from the Stamp Act crisis to the adoption of the Constitution of
1787, with human nature and its relationship to the political
process, it is now clear that they were grappling with and were
fully conscious that they were grappling with the knottiest and
most challenging of human problems. The central concern of the
men of the American Revolution was not merely the reaffirmation
and preservation of their Anglo-colonial heritage and not simply
the protection of liberty and property but, as Edmund S. Morgan
has put it, 132 the discovery of means “to check the inevitable op¬
eration of depravity in men who wielded power.” This “great intel¬
lectual challenge,” Morgan argued, engaged the “best minds of the
period” as politics replaced theology as “the most challenging area
of human thought and endeavor” and the intellectual leaders in
America “addressed themselves to the rescue, not of souls, but of
governments, from the perils of corruption.” This fear of human
nature, Morgan emphasized, lay behind the resistance of the
colonists to Britain between 1763 and 1783 and their insistence
that “the people of one region ought not to exercise dominion
over those of another” unless those subject to that dominion had
some control over it; this same fear, Morgan noted, drove them
to adopt written constitutions that would, by establishing “the
superiority of the people to their government,” give the people
some protection against “man's tyranny over man.”
The meaning of the American Revolution has thus come to be
seen primarily in the constitutions it produced and the ideas that
lay behind them. Hannah Arendt presented the fullest and most
systematic exposition of this view in On Revolution , 133 a trenchant
analysis of the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century
and the revolutionary tradition they spawned. The most significant
fact about the American Revolution, Arendt argued, was that
armed uprising and the Declaration of Independence were ac¬
companied not by chaos but by a “spontaneous outbreak of con¬
stitution-making.” And, she contended, the “true culmination” of
the Revolutionary process was not the struggle for liberation from
Britain but the effort to establish the freedom represented by those
M 2«The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement,”
in Paths of American Thought , Arthur M. Sclilesinger, Jr., and Morton
White, eds., (Boston, 1963), 11-33.
^New York, 1963.
74 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
constitutions. Fear of human nature, of the “chartless darkness of
the human heart" and the conviction that, in John Adams’ phrase,
there would be nothing “without a constitution" were initially be-
hind this fever of constitution-making. But it was the possibility of
creating a “community, which, even though it was composed of
‘sinners/ need not necessarily reflect this "sinful’ side of human
nature " the exhilarating hope, as Hamilton expressed it, that men
might establish “good government from reflection and choice" and
not be forever dependent “for their political constitutions on acci¬
dent and force,” that eventually made them conceive of constitu¬
tion-making as the “foremost and the noblest of all revolutionary
deeds" and emboldened them to try the great experiment in fed¬
eralism in 1787. To devise a national system which would, as
Madison put it, “guard . . . society against the oppression of its
rulers" by checking the various powers of government against one
another and still have sufficient power to protect “one part of
society against the injustice of the other part" was not, and the
Founders never understood it to be, an easy task that could be
accomplished to perfection. But they had the confidence of the
public and a degree of confidence in one another present elsewhere
only among conspirators, Arendt contended, and their accomplish¬
ment was notable. With the Constitution of 1787 they managed
both to consolidate the power of the American Revolution and to
provide a foundation for the freedom that was the ultimate con¬
cern of the Revolution.
BACKGROUND
THE EXTERNAL RELATIONSHIP
The following selections examine two separate aspects
of the relations between Great Britain and the colonies
in the eighteenth century. The first selection describes
the operation and assesses the impact of the navigation
system, while the second analyzes political and consti¬
tutional relations between imperial officials and their
representatives in the colonies, on one hand, and colo¬
nial lower houses of assembly on the other. What the
nature of those relationships was prior to 1763 and how
and why it changed between 1763 and 1776 are the
central questions raised by both selections.
curtis p. nettels (b. 1898) is a noted economic his¬
torian, now emeritus at Cornell University.
British Mercantilism and the
Economic Development of the
Thirteen Colonies
CURTIS P. NETTELS
Mercantilism is defined for this discussion as a policy of gov¬
ernment that expressed in the economic sphere the spirit of
nationalism that animinated the growth of the national state in
early modem times. The policy aimed to gain for the nation a
high degree of security or self-sufficiency, especially as regards
food supply, raw materials needed for essential industries, and the
sinews of war. This end was to be achieved in large measure by
Reprinted with permission from The Journal of Economic History , XII,
2 (Spring, 1952), 105-114.
76
CURTIS P. NETTELS 77
means of an effective control over the external activities and
resources upon which the nation was dependent. In turn, that urge
impelled the mercantilists to prefer colonial dependencies to
independent foreign countries in seeking sources of supply. If the
state could not free itself completely from trade with foreign
nations, it sought to control that trade in its own interest as much
as possible. To realize such objectives, mercantilism embraced
three subordinate and related policies. The Com Laws fostered the
nation’s agriculture and aimed to realize the ideal of self-sufficiency
as regards food supply. State aids to manufacturing industries,
such as the protective tariff, sought to provide essential finished
goods, including the sinews of war. The Navigation Acts were
intended to assure that foreign trade would be carried on in such
a way as to yield the maximum advantage to the state concerned.
Since the mercantilist states of Europe lacked the resources for
complete self-sufficiency, they could not free themselves from de¬
pendence on foreign supplies. Economic growth therefore in¬
creased the importance of external trade, and the preference for
colonies over foreign countries intensified the struggle for de¬
pendent possessions. The importance in mercantilism of a favor¬
able balance of trade and of a large supply of the precious metals
is a familiar theme. We need only to remind ourselves that the
mercantilists considered it the duty of government to obtain and
to retain for the nation both a favorable trade balance and an
adequate stock of gold and silver. To this end the state should help
to build up a national merchant marine and should foster do¬
mestic manufacturing industries. The chief means of procuring
raw materials, a favorable trade balance, and an ample supply
of the precious metals was that of exporting high-priced manu¬
factured goods and shipping services.
Despite its emphasis on government action, mercantilism was
not socialism. In England, the system invoked the initiative and
enterprise of private citizens. It encouraged the merchants, ship¬
pers, and manufacturers by conferring benefits upon them and by
identifying their private interests with the highest needs of the
state. So close was this identification that one may properly regard
the theory of mercantilism as a rationalization of the special in¬
terests of dominant groups of the time. The mercantilist policy
was an expression of an accord between landowners and mer¬
chant-capitalists in alliance with the Crown.
Is it possible to measure the influence of government on the
economic development of an area? Whether such influence be
large or small, it must necessarily be only one factor at work in
78 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the process of economic change. The range of influence of even
the most powerful government is limited, whereas economic ac¬
tivity is world-wide in its scope and ramifications. Thus far no
scheme of statecraft has succeeded in bending all the members of
the perverse human family to its designs. To many students of
economic affairs it may seem futile to attempt to isolate and to
measure the effect of only one factor in the immensely intricate,
varied, and shifting activities that are involved in the development
of a large area, such as the thirteen colonies. But perhaps such
an effort may serve a purpose. It at least stimulates thought, which
is essential to intellectual growth, and growth—not final answers
or ultimate solutions—is all that one can expect to attain in this
world of perpetual change.
To begin with, we note that the thirteen colonies experienced a
phenomenal development during the 150 years in which they
were subject to the regulating policies of English mercantilism.
Adam Smith said in 1776:
A nation may import to a greater value than it exports for half a
century, perhaps, together; the gold and silver which comes into it
during all this time may be all immediately sent out of it; its circu¬
lating coin may gradually decay, different sorts of paper money being
substituted in its place, and even the debts, too, which it contracts
with the principal nations with whom it deals, may be gradually in¬
creasing; and yet its real wealth, the exchangeable value of the annual
produce of its lands and labor, may, during the same period, have been
increasing in a much greater proportion. The state of our North Ameri¬
can colonies, and of the trade which they carried on with Great Britain,
before the commencement of the present disturbances, may serve as a
proof that this is by no means an impossible supposition.
To what extent did English mercantilism contribute to this
"real wealth”—this "exchangeable value of the annual produce of
. . . lands and labor?” Lands and labor. Two of the most funda¬
mental factors in the growth of the thirteen colonies were the
character of the people and the nature of the land and resources
to which they applied their labor. The connecting link between the
two that gave the thirteen colonies their unique character was the
system of small individual holdings that came into being, usually
at the start of settlement. It provided a strong incentive to labor
and was therefore a major factor in their development. Crevecoeur
spoke of "that restless industry which is the principal characteris¬
tic of these colonies,” and observed: "Here the rewards of . . .
[the farmer’s] industry follow with equal steps the progress of his
labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest.
CURTIS P. NETTELS 79
can it want a stronger allurement . . . ? As farmers they will be
careful and anxious to get as much as they can, because what
they get is their own.”
Although the land system of the thirteen colonies has not usu¬
ally been considered an element of mercantilism, yet it was not
divorced from it. Why did the English Government grant to its
colonies a benefit that was not commonly bestowed on settlers
by the other colonizing powers? Small holdings inspired the colo¬
nists to work; their labor expanded production; and increased
production enlarged English commerce. The resulting trade was
more susceptible to control by the state than a comparable trade
with foreign countries would have been. For this reason, the
colonial land system may be regarded as an expression of mer¬
cantilist policy. Viewed in this light, mercantilism contributed
directly to the growth of the settlements.
Such also was the effect of the policy of England with refer¬
ence to the peopling of its part of America. The government
opened the doors to immigrants of many nationalities and creeds.
Its liberality in this respect was unique. It harmonized with the
mercantilist doctrine. The Crown admitted dissenters and for¬
eigners in order to expand colonial production and trade. Such
immigrants were, to a large extent, industrious, progressive, and
energetic. Their productivity was stimulated by the climate of
freedom in which they lived—a climate that was made possible
in good measure by the indulgence of the government. The re¬
sulting growth of English trade served the needs of the state
as they were viewed by the mercantilists.
We shall next consider the effects of specific mercantilist laws
and government actions on the economic development of the
thirteen colonies. It appears at once that such laws and actions
did not create or sustain any important industry or trade in
Colonial America. The major economic pursuits of the colonies
grew out of, and were shaped by, the nature of the resources of
the land, the needs of the settlers, and the general state of world
trade in the seventeenth century. No important colonial activity
owed its birth or existence to English law. The statutes and poli¬
cies of mercantilism, with an exception or two, sought to control,
to regulate, to restrain, to stimulate, or to protect. In the great
majority of instances it was not the role of the government to
initiate, to originate, to create. All the important mercantilist laws
were adopted in response to a development that had occurred.
They undertook to encourage, or to regulate, or to suppress some
industry, practice, or trade that had been initiated by private
80 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
citizens and which they had proved to be profitable. When the
origins of enterprise in America are considered, it appears that
every important industry got its start by reason of the natural
resources of an area, by virtue of the demand for a product, or
because of such factors of trade as transportation or location.
Ordinarily, the government did not subject a colonial activity to
regulation by law until it had proved itself to be profitable. In
Virginia, for instance, the government did not initiate the tobacco
industry or attempt to stimulate its early development. Rather,
the Crown sought to discourage it. After it had taken root under
the influence of general economic conditions, the government
stepped in to regulate it. The major Navigation Act was passed
in response to the success of the Dutch in world commerce. The
English Government did not legislate against certain industries
in the colonies until they had grown of their own accord to the
extent that they menaced their English counterparts. The cur¬
rency policy which England applied to its colonies was worked
out not in a vacuum but in answer to practices in which the
colonists were engaging.
The effects of mercantilist laws naturally depended upon their
enforcement. Since they almost invariably sought to prevent some¬
thing that the colonists had found to be profitable, the task of
enforcement was difficult. It required the exercise of force and
vigilance.
In a general way, the government attained a reasonable suc¬
cess in its efforts to enforce the policies that bore directly on the
southern mainland colonies, whereas the principal acts which
were designed for the Middle Colonies and New England could
not be made effective.
The program for the plantation area embraced several policies.
The Navigation Act of 1661 excluded from its trade all foreign
merchants and foreign vessels. By the terms of the Staple Act of
1663 the planters must buy most of their manufactured goods
from England. Slaves must be bought from English slave traders.
The area must depend upon English sources for capital and
credit, and the planters could not avail themselves of legal devices
in order to ease their burdens of debt.
The government made a strenuous effort to enforce these
policies. The decisive action centered in the three Dutch wars
between 1652 and 1675. The defeat of the Dutch drove them
from the southern trade and enabled the English merchants to
hold it as in a vise. After 1665 the development of the plantation
colonies proceeded in conformity with the tenets of mercantilism.
CURTIS P. NETIELS 8l
The effect was to retard that development, since the planters were
subjected to a virtual English monopoly and were denied the
benefits of competitive bidding for their crops and the privilege
of buying foreign goods and shipping services in the cheapest
market.
Certain conditions of the period 1675 to 1775 favored the
English mercantilists in their efforts to enforce the southern
policy. The geography of the Chesapeake country made it easy to
exclude foreign vessels, since the English navy had to control
only the narrow entrance to the bay in order to keep foreign
vessels from reaching the plantations. That the tobacco ships had
to move slowly along the rivers made concealment impossible
for interlopers. Secondly, there was the factor of debt. Once a
planter had become indebted to an English merchant, he was
obliged to market his crops through his creditor in order to obtain
new supplies. Hence he lost the advantage of competitive bidding
for his export produce. And finally, the four wars with France,
1689—1763, served to rivet the plantation area to Britain, as
mercantilism intended. The British navy provided convoys for
the tobacco ships, and the expenditures of the Crown in America
for military purposes provided the planters with additional buying
power for English goods, thereby increasing their dependence on
British merchants, vessels, and supplies.
By reason of the acts of government, the economic development
of the southern colonies exhibited after 1665 about as clear an
example of effective political control of economic activity as one
can find. The trade of the southern colonies was centered in
Britain. They were obliged to employ British shipping, to depend
on British merchants, and to look only to British sources for
capital and credit. They were not permitted to interfere with the
British slave trade. British investments enjoyed a sheltered market
in that the Crown excluded the foreign investor from the area
and prohibited the colonists from taking any legal steps that
would impair the claims of British creditors. The resulting de¬
pendence of the plantation country gave it a strongly British
character, retarded its development, fostered discontent, and
goaded the planters to resistance and revolt.
The initial enforcement of the Navigation Acts in the 1660’s
reduced the profits of the tobacco planters and forced them to
cut the costs of production. Slavery was the answer. Appropriately
at this time the English Government undertook to furnish its
colonies with an ample supply of slaves. The planters were
obliged to buy them on credit—a main factor in reducing them
82 REINTERPRET ATI ON OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to a state of commercial bondage. The English Government for¬
bade the planters to curtail the nefarious traffic. American slavery
was thus one of the outstanding legacies of English mercantilism.
That resolute foe of English mercantilist policy, George Washing¬
ton, subscribed to the following resolve in 1774: “We take this
opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire
stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade.”
In another sense the Navigation Act of 1661 had a discernible
effect on American development. It stimulated the shipbuilding
and shipping industries in New England and the Middle Colonies.
It did not, however, create those industries. But the English
Government drove the Dutch from the trade of English America
before English shipping could meet the full needs of the colonies.
The Navigation Act gave to English colonial shipbuilders and
shipowners the same privileges that were given to English ship¬
builders and shipowners. Undoubtedly this favored treatment
spurred on the shipping industries of New England. Shipbuilding
flourished there, since the colonial builders were permitted to sell
their product to English merchants, and New England shipowners
could employ their American-built vessels in the trade of the
whole empire. New England benefited directly from the expulsion
of the Dutch from the trade of English America. After New
England’s shipbuilding industry had become fully established
(and had proved itself more efficient than its English rival) the
British Government refused to heed the pleas of British ship¬
owners who wished to subject it to crippling restraints.
English policy for the plantation area was essentially negative.
It did not originate enterprises. With one exception it did not
attempt to direct economic development into new channels. The
exception appears in the bounty granted for indigo—a form of
aid that made the production of that commodity profitable and
sustained it in the lower South until the time of the Revolution,
when the industry expired with the cessation of the bounty.
The policies that affected the Middle Colonies and New Eng¬
land differed materially in character and effect from the policies
that were applied to the South. The northern area received the
privilege of exporting its chief surplus products—fish, meats,
cereals, livestock, lumber—directly to foreign markets. As al¬
ready noted, the northern maritime industries flourished under
the benefits conferred upon them by the Navigation Acts. Free¬
dom to export the staples of the area in company with vigorous
shipbuil din g and shipping industries induced the northerners to
engage in a varied foreign trade. This outcome, however, was in
CURTIS P. NETTELS 83
part a result of certain restrictive measures of the English Gov¬
ernment. It prohibited the importation into England of American
meats and cereals, thereby forcing the colonists to seek foreign
markets for their surplus.
The resulting trade of the northern area—with southern Eu¬
rope, the Wine Islands, Africa, and the foreign West Indies—
did not prove satisfactory to the English mercantilists. It built
up in the colonies a mercantile interest that threatened to com¬
pete successfully with English traders and shipowners. It carried
with it the danger that the northerners might nullify those fea¬
tures of the Navigation Acts which aimed to center most of the
trade of English America in England. Nor did their reliance on
foreign trade prove to be entirely satisfactory to the colonists.
In time of war, their vessels were exposed to the depredations of
the French. The English navy could not protect the diverse
northern trades with convoys, as it protected the simpler, more
concentrated commerce of the plantation area. The wartime dis¬
ruption of the northern trade deprived the area of the foreign
money and products that in peacetime its merchants carried to
England for the purpose of buying English goods for the colonial
market. The resulting decline of the exportation of English
merchandise was then deplored by the English mercantilists.
Unable to procure finished goods in England, the northerners
were driven to manufacture for themselves. Thence arose what
the mercantilists regarded as a fatal danger—the prospect that
the colonies would manufacture for themselves, decrease their
purchases in England, and produce a surplus of finished goods
that would compete with English wares in the markets of the
world.
To avoid this danger, the English mercantilists devised their
major experiment in state planning of the early eighteenth cen¬
tury. They undertook to foster the production of naval stores in
the Middle Colonies and New England. Such products would be
sent directly to England as a means of paying for English goods.
They would divert the colonists from domestic manufacturing
and free them from their dependence on diverse foreign trades.
They would transform the commerce of the northern area in
such a way that it would resemble that of the plantation area—
a simple, direct exchange of American raw products for English
finished goods.
The naval-stores program was constructive in intent. The
government sought to shape the development of the northern
area, thereby solving a serious problem. But the policy failed. It
84 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
did not stimulate the production of naval stores in the northern
area sufficiently to provide it with adequate payments for English
goods, or to divert the northerners from their foreign trades, or
to halt the trend toward home manufacturing.
This failure led the mercantilists to embrace a purely negative
policy. As the trade of the northern area with the foreign West
Indies increased, the English Government undertook to stop it
altogether. Such was its intent in imposing upon the colonies the
Molasses Act of 1733. But that effort did not succeed. Again, a
mercantilist policy failed to bear its expected fruit.
The early policies of mercantilism had a marked effect on the
growth of the northern area. But the result turned out to be
unpleasing to the English authorities. Their endeavors to give a
new direction to the development of the area failed completely
after 1700. A problem had arisen for which English mercantilism
never found a solution.
The main element in this problem was the trend in the northern
area toward domestic manufacturing. Since that trend menaced
all the essentials of mercantilism, the English Government did
its best to thwart it. Thus there was no more important ingredient
in English policy than the determined effort to retard or prevent
the growth in America of industries that would produce the sort
of goods that England could export at the greatest profit. Such,
chiefly, were doth, ironware, hats, and leather goods. The effec¬
tiveness of the laws and orders against colonial manufacturing
is a subject of dispute. It is difficult to prove why something did
not happen. If the colonies were slow in developing manufactur¬
ing industries, was it the result of English policy or of other
factors? The writer believes that English policies had a strong
retarding influence. The barriers erected were extensive and
formidable. British statutes restrained the American woolen, iron,
and hat industries. The colonies could not impose protective
tariffs on imports from England. They could not operate mints,
create manufacturing corporations, or establish commercial banks
—institutions that are essential to the progress of manufacturing.
It was easier to enforce a policy against American fabricating
industries than a policy that aimed to regulate maritime trade. A
vessel could slip in and out of the northern ports. A manufactur¬
ing plant and its operations could not be concealed, unless, as
in later times, it was engaged in mountain moonshining. The
exposure of factories to the gaze of officials undoubtedly deterred
investors from building them in defiance of the law.
New industries in an economically backward country com-
CURTIS I>. NETTELS 85
monly needed the positive encouragement and protection of gov¬
ernment. It was the rule of mercantilism that handicaps to home
manufacturing should be overcome by tariffs, bounties, and other
forms of state aid. Such stimuli were denied to the colonies
while they were subject to English mercantilism. Not only was
the imperial government hostile; equally important, the colonial
governments were not allowed to extend assistance to American
promoters who wished to establish industries on the basis of
efficient, large-scale operations.
An important aspect of the influence of state policy is its effect
on the attitude of the people who are subjected to its benefits
and restraints. The colonists as a whole were not seriously an¬
tagonized by the British imperium prior to 1763. Its most detri¬
mental policy—that of the Molasses Act—was not enforced. In
time of war (which meant thirty-five years of the period from
1689 to 1763) the military expenditures of the Crown in America
helped to solve the most crucial problem of the colonies by supply¬
ing them with funds with which they could pay their debts and
buy needed supplies in England. The shipbuilders and shipowners
of the northern area shared in the national monopoly of imperial
trade. Underlying all policy and legislation was the extremely
liberal action of the English Government in making land avail¬
able to settlers on easy terms and of admitting into the colonies
immigrants of diverse nationalities, and varied religious faiths.
After 1763 the story is different. The colonies no longer re¬
ceived the sort of easy money that they had obtained from mili¬
tary expenditures during the wars. Instead, they were called
upon to support through British taxes the defense establishment
that was to be maintained in America after the war. Britain now
abandoned its old liberal practice regarding land and immigration
and replaced it with restrictive measures suggestive of the colo¬
nial policies of France and Spain. The Crown proceeded to enforce
with vigor all the restraints it had previously imposed on colonial
enterprise. Most of the features of the imperial rule that had
placated the colonists were to be done away with. Not only were
the old restraints to be more strictly enforced, they were to be
accompanied by a host of new ones. The policies of Britain after
1763 merely intensified the central difficulty of the trade of the
colonies. How might they find the means of paying for the
manufactured goods that they must buy from England? If they
could not get adequate returns, they would have to manufacture
for themselves.
In its total effect, British policy as it affected the colonies after
86 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1763 was restrictive, injurious, negative. It offered no solutions
of problems. In the meantime, the colonists, having lived so long
under the rule of mercantilism, had become imbued with mer¬
cantilist ideas. If the British imperium would not allow them to
grow and expand, if it would not provide a solution of the central
problem of the American economy, the colonists would have to
take to themselves the right and the power to guide their eco¬
nomic development. They would find it necessary to create a new
authority that would foster American shipping and commerce,
make possible the continued growth of setdement, and above all
stimulate the growth of domestic manufacturing industries. Thus
another result of English mercantilism was the American Revo¬
lution and the creation thereafter of a new mercantilist state on
this side of the Atlantic.
The Role of the Lower Houses of Assembly
in Eighteenth-Century Politics
JACK P. GREENE
The rise of the representative assemblies was perhaps the most
significant political and constitutional development in the history
of Britain's overseas empire before the American Revolution.
Crown and proprietary authorities had obviously intended the
governor to be the focal point of colonial government with the
lower houses merely subordinate bodies called together when
necessary to levy taxes and ratify local ordinances proposed by
the executive. Consequently, except in the New England charter
colonies, where the representative bodies early assumed a leading
role, they were dominated by the governors and councils for
most of the period down to 1689. But beginning with the Restor¬
ation and intensifying their efforts during the years following
the Glorious Revolution, the lower houses engaged in a successful
quest for power as they set about to restrict the authority of the
executive, undermine the system of colonial administration laid
down by imperial and proprietary authorities, and make them¬
selves paramount in the affairs of their respective colonies.
Reprinted with substantial additions and with permission from The
Journal of Southern History , XXVII, 4 (November, 1961), 451-474.
JACK P. GREENE Sj
Historians have been fascinated by this phenomenon. For
nearly a century after 1776 they interpreted it as a prelude to
the American Revolution. In the 1780’s the pro-British historian
George Chalmers saw it as the early manifestation of a latent
desire for independence, an undutiful reaction to the mild policies
of the Mother Country. 1 In the middle of the nineteenth century
the American nationalist George Bancroft, although more inter¬
ested in other aspects of colonial history, looked upon it as the
natural expression of American democratic principles, simply
another chapter in the progress of mankind. 2 The reaction to
these sweeping interpretations set in during the last decades of
the nineteenth century, when Charles M. Andrews, Edward
Charming, Herbert L. Osgood, and others began to investigate in
detail and to study in context developments from the Restoration
to the end of the Seven Years’ War. Osgood put a whole squadron
of Columbia students to work examining colonial political insti¬
tutions, and they produced a series of institutional studies in
which the evolution of the lower houses was a central feature.
These studies clarified the story of legislative development in
each colony, but this necessarily piecemeal approach, as well as
the excessive fragmentation that characterized the more general
narratives of Osgood and Channing, tended to emphasize the
differences rather than the similarities in the rise of the lower
houses and failed to produce a general analysis of the common
features of their quest for power. 3 Among later scholars, Leonard
W. Labaree in bis excellent monograph Royal Government in
America presented a comprehensive survey of the institutional
development of the lower houses in the royal colonies and of the
specific issues involved in their struggles with the royal govem-
iGeorge~Chaimers, An Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the
American Colonies (2 vols., Boston, 1845), I, 223—26, and II, 226—28, par¬
ticularly, for statements of Chalmers' position.
2 George Bancroft, History of the United States (14th ed., 10 vols., Boston,
1854-1875), III, 1-108, 383-98, particularly.
^Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century
(3 vols., New York, 1904-1907) and The American Colonies in the Eight¬
eenth Century (4 vols.. New York, 1924-1925). For Edward Channing's
treatment see A History of the United States (6 vols., New York, 1905-1925),
II. Representative of the studies of Osgood's students are William R. Shep¬
herd, History of Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania (New York, 1896);
Newton D. Mereness, Maryland As a Proprietary Province (New York, 1901);
W. Roy Smith, South Carolina As a Royal Province, 1719-1776 (New York,
1903); Charles L. Raper, North Carolina: A Study in English Colonial Gov¬
ernment (New York, 1904); William H. Fry, New Hampshire As a Royal
Province (New York, 1908); Edwin P. Tanner, The Province of New Jersey,
1664-1738 (New York, 1908); Edgar J. Fisher, New Jersey As a Royal
Province, 1738-1776 (New York, 1911); and Percy S. Flippin, The Royal
Government in Virginia, 1624—1775 (New York, 1919).
88 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ors, but he did not offer any systematic interpretation of the
general process and pattern of legislative development. 4 Charles
Andrews promised to tackle this problem and provide a synthesis
in the later volumes of his magnum opus. The Colonial Period of
American History, but he died before completing that part of the
project. 5
As a result, some fundamental questions have never been fully
answered, and no one has produced a comprehensive synthesis.
No one has satisfactorily worked out the basic pattern of the
quest; analyzed the reasons for and the significance of its de¬
velopment; explored its underlying assumptions and theoretical
foundations; or assessed the consequences of the success of the
lower houses, particularly the relationship between their rise to
power and the coming of the American Revolution. This essay is
intended to suggest some tentative conclusions about these prob¬
lems, not to present ultimate solutions. My basic research on the
lower houses has been in the Southern royal colonies and in Nova
Scotia. One of the present purposes is to test the generalizations
I have arrived at about the Southern colonies by applying them
to what scholars have learned of the legislatures in the other
colonies. This procedure has the advantage of providing perspec¬
tive on the story of Southern developments. At the same time, it
may serve as one guidepost for a general synthesis in the future.
Any student of the eighteenth-century political process will
sooner or later be struck by the fact that, although each of the
lower houses developed independently and differently, their stories
were similar. The elimination of individual variants, which tend
to cancel out each other, discloses certain basic regularities, a
clearly discernible pattern—or what the late Sir Lewis Namier
called a morphology—common to all of them. They all moved
along like paths in their drives for increased authority, and al¬
though their success on specific issues differed from colony to
colony and the rate of their rise varied from time to time, they
^Leonard W. Labaxee, Royal Government in America (New Haven, 1930),
172-311, particularly. Two other illuminating studies by Labaree’s contem¬
poraries are A. B. Keith, Constitutional History of the First British Empire
(Oxford, 1930), which is legalistic in emphasis, and John F. Bums, Con¬
troversies Between Royal Governors and Their Assemblies in the Northern
American Colonies (Boston, 1923), which fails to tie together in any satis¬
factory way developments in the four colonies it treats.
5 Charles M. Andrews, “On the Writing of Colonial History,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., I (January, 1944), 29-42. The line of interpreta¬
tion that Andrews would probably have followed is briefly developed in his
brilliant The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (New Haven,
1924), 3-65.
JACK P. GEEENE 89
all ended up at approximately the same destination. They passed
successively through certain vaguely defined phases of political
development. Through most of the seventeenth century the lower
houses were still in a position of subordination, slowly groping for
the power to tax and the right to sit separately from the council
and to initiate laws. Sometime during the early eighteenth cen¬
tury most of them advanced to a second stage at which they
could battle on equal terms with the governors and councils and
challenge even the powers in London if necessary. At that point
the lower houses began their bid for political supremacy. The
violent eruptions that followed usually ended in an accommoda¬
tion with the governors and councils which paved the way for
the ascendancy of the lower houses and saw the virtual eclipse
of the colonial executive. By the end of the Seven Years’ War,
and in some instances considerably earlier, the lower houses had
reached the third and final phase of political dominance and
were in a position to speak for the colonies in the conflict with
the imperial government which ensued after 1763.
By 1763, with the exception of the lower houses in the corpo¬
rate colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut, which had virtu¬
ally complete authority, the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts
houses of representatives were probably most powerful. Having
succeeded in placing its election on a statutory basis and depriv¬
ing the Council of direct legislative authority in the Charter of
Privileges in 1701, the Pennsylvania House under the astute guid¬
ance of David Lloyd secured broad financial and appointive
powers during the administrations of Daniel Gookin and Sir
William Keith. Building on these foundations, it gained almost
complete dominance in the 1730’s and 1740’s despite the opposi¬
tion of the governors, whose power and prestige along with that
of the Council declined rapidly. 6 The Massachusetts House, hav¬
ing been accorded the unique privilege of sharing in the selection
of the Council by the royal charter in 1691, already had a strong
tradition of legislative supremacy inherited from a half century
^Developments in Pennsylvania may be traced in Shepherd, Proprietary
Government , op. cit.; Benjamin Franklin, An Historical Review of Pennsylvania
(London, 1759); Roy N. Lokken, David Lloyd: Colonial Lawmaker (Seattle,
1959); Sister Joan de Lourdes Leonard, The Organization and Procedure of
the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1682-1772 (Philadelphia, 1949); Winifred T.
Root, The Relation of Pennsylvania with the British Government, 1696—1765
(Philadelphia, 1912); and Theodore Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the
Growth of Democracy, 1740—1776 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1953). On Rhode Island
and Connecticut see David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the Ameri¬
can Revolution, 1760—1776 (Providence, 1958), and Oscar Zeichner, Connec¬
ticut’s Years of Controversy, 1754-1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1949).
90 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of corporate experience. During the first thirty years under the
w*T^- C ^ iarter : ^ rst benevolent policies of Sir William Phips and
nliam Stoughton and then wartime conditions during the ten-
9? Joseph Dudley and Samuel Shute enabled the House, led
y Elisha Cooke, Jr., to extend its authority greatly. It emerged
rorn the conflicts over the salary question during the 1720’s with
hrm control over finance, and the Crown’s abandonment of its
demand for a permanent revenue in the early 1730’s paved the
way for an accommodation with subsequent governors and the
eventual dominance of the House under Governor William Shirley
after 1740J
The South Carolina Commons and New York House of As¬
sembly were only slightly less powerful. Beginning in the first
decade of the eighteenth century, the South Carolina lower house
gradually assumed an ironclad control over all aspects of South
Carolina government, extending its supervision to the minutest
details of local administration after 1730 as a succession of
governors, including Francis Nicholson, Robert Johnson, Thomas
Broughton, the elder William Bull, and James Glen offered little
determined opposition. The Commons continued to grow in
stature after 1750 while the Council’s standing declined because
of the Crown, policy of filling it with placemen from England and
the Common’s successful attacks upon its authority. 8 The New
York House of Assembly began to demand greater authority in
reaction to the mismanagement of Edward Hyde, Viscount Com-
bury, during the first decade of the eighteenth century. Gover-
nor Robert Hunter met the challenge squarely during his ten-year
administration beginning in 1710, but he and his successors
could not check the rising power of the House. During the seven-
year tenure of George Clarke beginning in 1736, the House
advanced into the final stage of development. Following Clarke,
^Useful studies on Massachusetts are Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class
Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691—1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1955); Martin L. Cole, The Rise of the Legislative Assembly in Provincial
Massachusetts (unpublished Ph.D. thesis. State University of Iowa, 1939);
Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachu¬
setts-Bay, Lawrence S. Mayo, ed. (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1936); and
Henry R. Spencer, Constitutional Conflict in Provincial Massachusetts (Co¬
lumbus, O., 1905).
8 The best published study on South Carolina is Smith, South Carolina As
a Royal Province. Also useful are David D. Wallace, The Life of Henry
Laurens (New York, 1915); Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power of the
Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1730-1763
(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1956); and M. Eugene Sirmans,
“The South Carolina Royal Council, 1720-1763” William and Mary Quar¬
terly, 3rd ser., XVTH (July, 1961), 373-92.
JACK P. GREENE gi
George Clinton made a vigorous effort to reassert the authority
of the executive, but neither he nor any of his successors was
able to challenge the power of the House. 9
The lower houses of North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia
developed more slowly. The North Carolina lower house was
fully capable of protecting its powers and privileges and compet¬
ing on equal terms with the executive during the last years of
proprietary rule and under the early royal governors, George
Burrington and Gabriel Johnston. But it was not until Arthur
Dobbs’ tenure in the 1750’s and 1760’s that, meeting more regu¬
larly, it assumed the upper hand in North Carolina politics under
the astute guidance of Speaker Samuel Swann and Treasurers
John Starkey and Thomas Barker. 10 In New Jersey the lower
house was partially thwarted in its spirited bid for power during
the 1740’s under the leadership of John Kinsey and Samuel Nevill
by the determined opposition of Governor Lewis Morris, and it
did not gain superiority until the administrations of Jonathan
Belcher, Thomas Pownall, Francis Bernard, and Thomas Boone
during the Seven Years’ War. 11 Similarly, the Virginia Burgesses
vigorously sought to establish its control in the second decade
of the century under Alexander Spotswood, but not until the ad¬
ministrations of Sir William Gooch and Robert Dinwiddie, when
first the expansion of the colony and then the Seven Years’ War
required more regular sessions, did the Burgesses finally gain
the upper hand under the effective leadership of Speaker John
Robinson. 12
developments in New York can be followed in Carl L. Becker, The History
of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760—1776 (Madison,
1909); Milton M. Klein, ‘democracy and Politics in Colonial New York,”
New York History, XL (July 1959), 221-46; Lawrence H. Leder, Robert
Livingston, 1654—1728, and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1961); Beverly McAnear, Politics in Provincial New York, 1689-1761
(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1935); Irving Mark, Agrarian
Conflicts in Colonial New York, 1711—1775 (New York, 1940); William
Smith, The History of the Late Province of New York (2 vols.. New York,
1829); and Charles W. Spencer. Phases of Royal Government in New York,
1691-1719 (Columbus, O., 1905).
10 Useful analyses of North Carolina are Raper, North Carolina, op. cit., and
Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs Esquire, 1689-1765 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957).
n New Jersey developments can be traced in Donald L. Kemmerer’s excel¬
lent study. Path to Freedom: The Struggle for Self-Government in Colonial
New Jersey, 1703—1776 (Princeton, 1940).
“Among the more useful secondary works on Virginia are Flippin, Royal
Government, op. cit.; Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Vir¬
ginia,” in James M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays on Colo¬
nial History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 90-115; Lucille Blanche Griffith, The
Virginia House of Burgesses, 1750—1774 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Brown
University, 1957); Ray Orvin Hummel, Jr., The Virginia House of Burgesses,
92 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Among the lower houses in the older colonies, only the Mary¬
land House of Delegates and the New Hampshire House of As¬
sembly failed to reach the final level of development in the period
before 1763. The Maryland body made important advances early
in the eighteenth century while under the control of the Crown
and aggressively sought to extend its authority in the 1720’s under
the leadership of the older Daniel Dulany and again in the late
1730’s and early 1740’s under Dr. Charles Carroll. But the pro¬
prietors were usually able to thwart these attempts, and the Dele¬
gates failed to pull ahead of the executive despite a concerted
effort during the last intercolonial war under the administration
of Horatio Sharpe. 13 In New Hampshire, the House had exercised
considerable power through the early decades of the eighteenth
century, but Governor Benning Wentworth effectively challenged
its authority after 1740 and prevented it from attaining the exten¬
sive power exercised by its counterparts in other colonies. 14 It
should be emphasized, however, that neither the Maryland nor
the New Hampshire lower house was in any sense impotent and
along with their more youthful equivalent in Georgia gained
dominance during the decade of debate with Britain after 1763.
Of the lower houses in the continental colonies with pre-1763
political experience, only the Nova Scotia Assembly had not
reached the final phase of political dominance by 1776. 15
The similarities in the process and pattern of legislative de¬
velopment from colony to colony were not entirely accidental.
The lower houses faced like problems and drew upon common
traditions and imperial precedents for solutions. They all oper¬
ated in the same broad imperial context and were affected by
common historical forces. Moreover, family, cultural, and com-
1689—1750 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of Nebraska, 1934); David
J. Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1721—1803 (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1952);
Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washing¬
ton’s Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952); Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Give Me
Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia (Philadelphia, 1958);
and David Alan Williams, Political Alignments in Colonial Virginia, 1698-
1750 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1959).
^On Maryland see two excellent studies, Charles A. Barker, The Back¬
ground of the Revolution in Maryland (New Haven, 1940), and Aubrey
Land, The Dulanys of Maryland (Baltimore, 1955).
14 New Hampshire developments can be followed in Fry, New Hampshire,
op. cit., and Jeremy Belknap, History of New Hampshire (3 vols., Boston,
1791-1792).
^On Georgia see W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754-1775
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), and Albert B. Saye, New Viewpoints in Georgia
History (Atlanta, 1943). John Bartlett Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of
Nova Scotia (New York, 1937), is the best study of developments in that
colony.
JACK P. GREENE 93
mercial ties often extended across colony lines, and newspapers
and other printed materials, as well as individuals, often found
their way from one colony to another. The result was at least a
general awareness of issues and practices in neighboring colonies,
and occasionally there was even a conscious borrowing of pre¬
cedents and traditions. Younger bodies such as the Georgia Com¬
mons and Nova Scotia Assembly were particularly indebted to
their more mature counterparts in South Carolina and Massa¬
chusetts Bay. 16 On the executive side, the similarity in attitudes,
assumptions, and policies among the governors can be traced in
large measure to the fact that they were all subordinate to the
same central authority in London, which pursued a common
policy in all the colonies.
Before the Seven Years’ War the quest was characterized by a
considerable degree of spontaneity, by a lack of awareness that
activities of the moment were part of any broad struggle for
power. Rather than consciously working out the details of some
master plan designed to bring them liberty or self-government,
the lower houses moved along from issue to issue and from situa¬
tion to situation, primarily concerning themselves with the prob¬
lems at hand and displaying a remarkable capacity for spontane¬
ous action, for seizing any and every opportunity to enlarge their
own influence at the executive’s expense and for holding tena¬
ciously to powers they had already secured. Conscious of the
issues involved in each specific conflict, they were for the most
part unaware of and uninterested in the long-range implications
of their actions. Virginia Governor Francis Fauquier correctly
judged the matter in 1760. 'Whoever charges them with acting
upon a premeditated concerted plan, don’t know them,” he wrote
of the Virginia burgesses, "for they mean honestly, but are
Expedient Mongers in the highest Degree.” 17 Still, in retrospect
it is obvious that throughout the eighteenth century the lower
houses were engaged in a continuous movement to enlarge their
sphere of influence. To ignore that continuity would be to miss
the meaning of eighteenth-century colonial political development.
One is impressed with the rather prosaic manner in which the
lower houses went about the task of extending their authority,
with the infrequency of dramatic conflict. They gained much of
their power in the course of routine business, quietly and simply
extending and consolidating their authority of passing laws and
16 On this point see Abbot, ibid., and Brebner, ibid.
17 “Fauquier to Board of Trade,” June 2, 1760, in Colonial Office Papers
(London, Public Record Office), Series 5/1330, folios 37—39.
94 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
establishing practices, the implications of which escaped both
colonial executives and imperial authorities and were not always
fully recognized even by the lower houses themselves. In this
way they gradually extended their financial authority to include
the powers to audit accounts of all public officers, to share in
disbursing public funds, and eventually even to appoint officials
concerned in collecting and handling local revenues. Precedents
thus established soon hardened into fixed principles, “undoubted
rights” or “inherent powers,” changing the very fabric of their
respective constitutions. The notable absence of conflict is per¬
haps best illustrated by the none too surprising fact that the lower
houses made some of their greatest gains under those governors
with whom they enjoyed the most harmony, in particular Keith
in Pennsylvania, Shirley in Massachusetts, Hunter in New York,
and the elder and younger Bull in South Carolina. In Virginia
the House of Burgesses made rapid strides during the 1730’s and
1740’s under the benevolent government of Gooch, who dis¬
covered early in his administration that the secret of political
success for a Virginia governor was to reach an accord with the
plantation gentry.
One should not conclude that the colonies had no exciting leg¬
islative-executive conflicts, however. Attempts through the middle
decades of the eighteenth century by Clinton to weaken the
financial powers of the New York House, Massachusetts Govern¬
ors Samuel Shute and William Burnet to gain a permanent civil
list, Benning Wentworth to extend unilaterally the privilege of
representation to new districts in New Hampshire, Johnston
to break the extensive power of the Albemarle Counties in
the North Carolina lower house, Dinwiddie to establish a fee
for issuing land patents without the consent of the Virginia Bur¬
gesses, and Boone to reform South Carolina’s election laws each
provided a storm of controversy that brought local politics to a
fever pitch. 18 But such conflicts were the exception and usually
arose not out of the lower houses’ seeking more authority but
from the executives’ attempts to restrict powers already won.
“The details of these disputes can be traced in Smith, History of Nezv
York, op. cit., II, 68—151; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts Bay, op. cit.,
163-280; Labaree, Royal Government, 180-185; Lawrence F. London, “The
Representation Controversy in Colonial North Carolina,” North Carolina
Historical Review, XI (October, 1934), 255-270; Jack P. Greene, ed., “The
Case of the Pistole Fee,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXVT
(October, 1958), 399—422, and ‘"The Gadsden Election Controversy and the
Revolutionary Movement in South Carolina,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review, XLVI (December, 1959), 469-492.
JACK P. GREENE 95
Impatient of restraint and jealous of their rights and privileges,
the lower houses responded forcefully and sometimes violently
when executive action threatened to deprive them of those rights.
Only a few governors, men of the caliber of Henry Ellis in
Georgia and to a lesser extent William Henry Lyttelton in South
Carolina and Bernard in New Jersey, had the skill to challenge
established rights successfully without raising the wrath of the
lower houses. Clumsier tacticians—Pennsylvania’s William Denny,
New York’s Clinton, Virginia’s Dinwiddie, North Carolina’s
Dobbs, South Carolina’s Boone, Georgia’s John Reynolds—failed
when pursuing similar goals.
Fundamentally, the quest for power in both the royal and the
proprietary colonies was a struggle for political identity, the
manifestation of the political ambitions of the leaders of emerg¬
ing societies within each colony. There is a marked correlation
between the appearance of economic and social elites produced
by the growth in colonial wealth and population on the one hand
and the lower houses’ demand for increased authority, dignity,
and prestige on the other. In the eighteenth century a group of
planters, merchants, and professional men had attained or were
rapidly acquiring within the colonies wealth and social position.
The lower houses’ aggressive drive for power reflects the deter¬
mination of this new elite to attain through the representative
assemblies political influence as well. In another but related sense,
the lower houses’ efforts represented a movement for autonomy
in local affairs, although it is doubtful that many of the members
recognized them as such. The lower houses wished to strengthen
their authority within the colonies and to reduce to a minimum
the amount of supervision, with the uncertainties it involved, that
royal or proprietary authorities could exercise. Continuously
nourished by the growing desire of American legislators to be
masters of their own political fortunes and by the development
of a vigorous tradition of legislative superiority in imitation of
the imperial House of Commons, this basic principle of local
control over local affairs in some cases got part of its impetus
from an unsatisfactory experience early in the lower houses’
development with a despotic, inefficient, or corrupt governor such
as Thomas, Lord Culpeper, or Francis, Lord Howard or Effingham,
in Virginia, Lionel Copley in Maryland, Sir Edmund Andros in
Massachusetts, Seth Sothell in North Carolina, or the infamous
Combury in New York and New Jersey.
With most of their contemporaries in Great Britain, colonial
Americans were convinced that men were imperfect creatures.
q6 eeinteepeetation of the ameeican revolution
perpetually self-deluded, enslaved by their passions, vanities, and
interests, confined in their vision and understanding, and in¬
capable of exercising power over each other without abusing it.
This cluster of assumptions with the associated ideals of a gov¬
ernment of laws rather than of men and of a political structure
that restrained the vicious tendencies of man by checking them
against each other was at the heart of English constitutionalism.
In Britain and in the colonies, wherever Englishmen encountered
a seeming abuse of power, they could be expected to insist that
it be placed under legal and constitutional restraints. Because
the monarchy had been the chief offender in seventeenth-century
England, it became conventional for the representative branch
to keep an especially wary eye on the executive, and the Glorious
Revolution tended to institutionalize this pattern of behavior. The
necessity to justify the Revolution ensured both that the specter
of Stuart despotism would continue to haunt English political
arenas throughout the eighteenth century and that representative
bodies and representatives would be expected—indeed obliged—
to be constantly on the lookout for any signs of that excess of
gubernatorial power that would perforce result in executive
tyranny. When colonial lower houses demanded checks on the
prerogative and sought to undermine executive authority, they
were, then, to some extent, playing out roles created for them
by their predecessors in the seventeenth-century English House
of Commons and using a rhetoric and a set of ground rules that
grew out of the revolutionary conditions of Stuart England. In
every debate, and in every political contest, each American legis¬
lator was a potential Coke, Pym, or Hampden and each governor,
at least in legislators" minds, a potential Charles I or James II.
But the lower houses" quest for power involved more than the
extension of legislative authority within the colonies at the ex¬
pense of the colonial executives. After their ini tial stage of evolu¬
tion, the lower houses learned that their real antagonists were not
the governors but the proprietors or Crown officials in London.
Few governors proved to be a match for the representatives. A
governor was almost helpless to prevent a lower house from
exercising powers secured under his predecessors, and even the
most discerning governor could fall into the trap of assenting to
an apparently innocent law that would later prove damaging to
the royal or proprietary prerogative. Some governors, for the sake
of preserving amicable relations with the representatives or be¬
cause they thought certain legislation to be in the best interest
of a colony, actually conspired with legislative leaders to present
JACK P. GKEENE 97
the actions of the lower houses in a favorable light in London.
Thus, Jonathan Belcher worked with Massachusetts leaders to
parry the Crown’s demand for a permanent revenue in the 1730’s,
and Fauquier joined with Speaker John Robinson in Virginia to
prevent the separation of the offices of speaker and treasurer
during the closing years of the Seven Years’ War.
Nor could imperial authorities depend upon the colonial coun¬
cils to furnish an effective check upon the representatives’ ad¬
vancing influence. Most councilors were drawn from the rising
social and economic elites in the colonies. The duality of their
role is obvious. Bound by oath to uphold the interests of the
Crown or the proprietors, they were also driven by ambition and
a variety of local pressures to maintain the status and power of
the councils as well as to protect and advance their own indi¬
vidual interests and those of their group within the colonies.
These two objectives were not always in harmony, and the coun¬
cils frequently sided with the lower houses rather than with the
governors. With a weakened governor and an unreliable council,
the task of restraining the representative assemblies ultimately
devolved upon the home government. Probably as much of the
struggle for power was played out in Whitehall as in Williams¬
burg, Charleston, New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.
Behind the struggle between colonial lower houses and the
imperial authorities were two divergent, though on the colonial
side not wholly articulated, concepts of the constitutions of the
colonies and in particular of the status of the lower houses. To
the very end of the colonial period, imperial authorities persisted
in the views that colonial constitutions were static and that the
lower houses were subordinate governmental agencies with only
temporary and limited lawmaking powers—in the words of one
imperial official, merely “so many Corporations at a distance,
invested with an Ability to make Temporary By Laws for them¬
selves, agreeable to their respective Situations and Climates.” 19
In working out a political system for the colonies in the later
seventeenth century, imperial officials had institutionalized these
views in the royal commissions and instructions. Despite the fact
that the lower houses were yearly making important changes
in their respective constitutions, the Crown never altered either
the commissions or instructions to conform with realities of
19 Sir William Keith, “A Short Discourse on the Present State of the Col¬
onies in America with Respect to the Interest of Great Britain,” 1729, in
Colonial Office Papers (London, Public Record Office), Series 5/4, folios
170-171.
98 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the colonial political situation and continued to maintain through¬
out the eighteenth century that they were the most vital part of
the constitutional structure of the royal colonies. The Pennsyl-
vania and to a lesser extent the Maryland proprietors were less
rigid, although they also insisted upon their theoretical constitu¬
tional and political supremacy over the lower houses.
Colonial lower houses had little respect for and even less
patience with such a doctrinaire position, and whether or not
royal and proprietary instructions were absolutely binding upon
the colonies was the leading constitutional issue in the period
before 1763. As the political instruments of what was probably
the most pragmatic society in the eighteenth-century Western
World, colonial legislators would not likely be restrained by
dogma divorced from reality. They had no fear of innovations
and welcomed the chance to experiment with new forms and
ideas. All they asked was that a thing work. When the lower
houses found that instructions from imperial authorities did not
work in the best interests of the colonies, that they were, in fact,
antithetic to the very measures they as legislatures were trying to
effect, they openly refused to submit to them. Instructions, they
argued, applied only to officials appointed by the Crown.
Instructions from his majesty, to his governor, or the council, are
binding to them, and esteemed as laws or rules; because if either
should disregard them, they might immediately be displaced,
declared a South Carolina writer in 1756 while denying the
validity of an instruction that stipulated colonial councils should
have equal rights with the lower houses in framing money bills.
“But, if instructions should be laws and rules to the people of this
province, then there would be no need of assemblies, and all our
laws and taxes might be made and levied by an instruction.” 20
Clearly, then, instructions might bind governors, but never the
elected branch of the legislature.
Even though the lower houses, filled with intensely practical
politicians, were concerned largely with practical political con¬
siderations, they found it necessary to develop a body of theory
with which to oppose unpopular instructions from Britain and
to support their claims to greater political power. In those few
colonies that had charters, the lower houses relied upon the
guarantees in them as their first line of defense, taking the posi¬
tion that the stipulations of the charters were inviolate, despite
the fact that some had been invalidated by English courts, and
^South Carolina Gazette, May 13, 1756.
JACK P. GREENE 99
could not be altered by executive order. A more basic premise
which was equally applicable to all colonies was that the con¬
stituents of the lower houses, as inhabitants of British colonies,
were entitled to all the traditional rights of Englishmen. On this
foundation the colonial legislatures built their ideological struc¬
ture. In the early charters the Crown had guaranteed the
colonists "all privileges, franchises and liberties of this our king¬
dom of England . . . any Statute, act, ordinance, or provision
to the contrary thereof, notwithstanding.” 21 Such guarantees,
colonials assumed, merely constituted recognition that their privi¬
leges as Englishmen were inherent and unalterable and that it
mattered not whether they stayed on the home islands or mi¬
grated to the colonies. "His Majesty’s Subjects coming over to
America,” the South Carolina Commons argued in 1739 while
asserting its exclusive right to formulate tax laws, "have no more
forfeited this their most valuable Inheritance than they have
withdrawn their Allegiance.” No "Royal Order,” the Commons
declared, could "qualify or any wise alter a fundamental Right
from the Shape in which it was handed down to us from our
Ancestors.” 22
One of the most important of these rights was the privilege of
representation, on which, of course, depended the very existence
of the lower houses. Imperial authorities always maintained that
the lower houses existed only through the consent of the Crown, 23
but the houses insisted that an elected assembly was a funda¬
mental right of a colony arising out of an Englishman’s privilege
to be represented and that they did not owe their existence merely
to the King’s pleasure.
Our representatives, agreeably to the general sense of their constitu¬
ents [wrote New York lawyer William Smith in the 1750’s] are tena-
^For instance, see the provision in the Maryland charter conveniently
published in Merrill Jensen, ed., English Historical Documents: American
Colonial Documents to 1776 (New York, 1955), 88.
22 James H. Easterby and Ruth S. Green, eds., The Colonial Records of
South Carolina: The Journals of the Commons House of Assembly (8 vols.,
Columbia, 1951-1961), 1736-1739 (June 5, 1739), 720.
^This view was implicit in most thinking and writing about the colonies
by imperial authorities. For the attitude of John Carteret, Lord Granville, an
important figure in colonial affairs through the middle decades of the
eighteenth century, see Benjamin Franklin to Isaac Norris, March 19, 1759,
as quoted by William S. Mason, “Franklin and Galloway: Some Unpublished
Letters,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, n. s., XXXIV (1925),
245-46. Other examples are Jack P. Greene, ed., “Martin Bladen’s Blueprint
for a Colonial Union,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., XVII (October,
1960), 516-530, by a prominent member of the Board of Trade, and Archi¬
bald Kennedy, An Essay on the Government of the Colonies (New York,
1752), 17-18, by an official in the colonies.
IOO REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
dons in their opinion, that the inhabitants of this colony are entitled
to all the privileges of Englishmen; that they have a right to participate
in the legislative power, and that the session of assemblies here, is
wisely substituted instead of a representation in parliament, which, all
things considered, would, at this remote distance, be extremely incon¬
venient and dangerous. 24
The logical corollary to this argument was that the lower houses
were equivalents of the House of Commons and must perforce
in their limited spheres be entitled to all the privileges possessed
by that body in Great Britain. Hence, in cases where an invoca¬
tion of fundamental rights was not appropriate, the lower houses
frequently defended their actions on the grounds that they were
agreeable to the practice of the House of Commons. Thus in
1755 the North Carolina Lower House denied the right of the
Council to amend tax bills on the grounds that it was “contrary
to Custom and Usage of Parliament” 25 Unintentionally, Crown
officials encouraged the lower houses to make this analogy by
forbidding them in the instructions to exercise “any power or
privilege whatsoever which is not allowed by us to the House of
Commons . . . in Great Britain.” 26
Because neither fundamental rights nor imperial precedents
could be used to defend practices that were contrary to customs
of the mother country or to the British constitution, the lower
houses found it necessary to develop still another argument:
that local precedents, habits, traditions, and statutes were im¬
portant parts of their particular constitutions and could not be
abridged by a royal or proprietary order. The assumptions were
that the legislatures could alter colonial constitutions by their
own actions without the active consent of imperial officials and
that once the alterations were confirmed by usage they could
not be countermanded by the British government. They did not
deny the power of the governor to veto or of the Privy Council
to disallow their laws but argued that imperial acquiescence
over a long period of time was tantamount to consent and that
precedents thus established could not be undone without their
a PP rova l- The implication was that the American colonists saw
their constitutions as living, growing, and constantly changing
24 Smith, op. cit., I, 307.
25 Journals of the Lower House, January 4-6, 1755, William L. Saunders,
ed.. The Colonial Records of Nortk Carolina (10 vols., Raleigh, 1886-1890),
^Leonard W. Labaree, ed.. Royal Instructions to British Colonial Govern¬
ors, 1670-1776 (2 vols.. New York, 1935), I, 112-113.
JACK P. GREENE IOI
organisms, a theory which was directly opposite to the imperial
view. To be sure, precedent had always been an important ele¬
ment in shaping the British constitution, but Crown officials were
unwilling to concede that it was equally so in determining the
fundamental law of the colonies. They willingly granted that
colonial statutes, once formally approved by the Privy Council,
automatically became part of the constitutions of the colonies,
but they officially took the position that both royal instructions
and commissions, as well as constitutional traditions of the mother
country, took precedence over local practice or unconfirmed
statutes. 27 This conflict of views persisted throughout the period
after 1689, becoming more and more of an issue in the decades
immediately preceding the American Revolution.
In the last analysis it was the imperial denial of the validity
of the constitutional defenses of the lower houses that drove
colonial lawmakers to seek to extend the power of the lower
houses at the very time they were insisting—and, in fact, deeply
believed—that no one individual or institution should have a
superiority of power in any government. No matter what kind
of workable balance of power might be attained within the colo¬
nies, there was always the possibility that the home government
might unleash the unlimited might of the parent state against
the colonies. The chief fear of colonial legislators, then, was not
the power of the governors, which they could control, but that
of the imperial government, which in the circumstances they
could never hope to control, and the whole movement for legis¬
lative authority in the colonies can be interpreted as a search
for a viable constitutional arrangement in which the rights of
the colonists would be secured against the preponderant power
of the mother country. The failure of imperial authorities to
provide such an arrangement or even to formalize what small
concessions they did make, meant, of course, that the search
could never be fulfilled, and the resulting anxiety, only partly
conscious and finding expression through the classic arguments
and ringing phrases of English political struggles of the seven¬
teenth century, impelled the lower houses and the men who
composed them relentlessly through the colonial period and was
perhaps the most important single factor in the demand of patriot
leaders for explicit, written constitutions after the Declaration of
Independence.
2r For a classic statement of the imperial argument by a modern scholar
see Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution
(10 vols., Caldwell, Idaho, and New York, 1936-1961), in (rev.), 275-281.
102 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
It is nonetheless true that, if imperial authorities did not grant
the validity of the theoretical arguments of the lower houses,
neither did they make any systematic or concerted effort to force
a rigid compliance with official policies for most of the period
after 1689. Repressive measures, at least before 1763, rarely went
beyond the occasional disallowance of an offending statute or
the official reprimand of a rambunctious lower house. General
lack of interest in the routine business of colonial affairs and
failure to recognize the potential seriousness of the situation may
in part account for this leniency, but it is also true that official
policy under both Walpole and the Pelhams called for a light
rein on the colonies on the assumption that contented colonies
created fewer problems for the administration. "One would not
Strain any point,” Charles Delafaye, secretary to the lords jus¬
tices, cautioned South Carolina's Governor Francis Nicholson in
1722, “where it can be of no Service to our King or Country.”
“In the Plantations,” he added, “the Government should be as
Easy and Mild as possible to invite people to Settle under it.” 28
Three times between 1734 and 1749 the ministry failed to give
enthusiastic support to measures introduced into Parliament to
insure the supremacy of instructions over colonial laws. 29 Though
the Calverts were somewhat more insistent upon preserving their
proprietary prerogatives, in general the proprietors were equally
lax as long as there was no encroachment upon their land rights
or proprietary dues.
Imperial organs of administration were in fact inadequate to
deal effectively with all the problems of the empire. Since no
special governmental bodies were created in England to deal
exclusively with colonial affairs, they were handled through the
regular machinery of government—a maze of boards and officials
whose main interests and responsibilities were not the super-
vision of overseas colonies. The only body sufficiently informed
and interested to deal competently with colonial matters was the
Board of Trade, and it had little authority, except for the brief
period from 1748 to 1761 under the presidency of George Dunk,
Earl of Halifax. The most useful device for restraining the lower
houses was the Privy Council’s right to review colonial laws, but
even that was only partly effective, because the mass of colonial
*2 Nicholson, January 22, 1722, In Papers Concerning the Gov-
55?^^ “T. ‘“"">*7. e™-
<**» *
JACK P. GREENE 103
statutes annually coming before the Board of Trade made a
thorough scrutiny impossible. Under such arrangements no
vigorous colonial policy was likely. The combination of imperial
lethargy and colonial aggression virtually guaranteed the suc¬
cess of the lower houses’ quest for power. An indication of a
growing awareness in imperial circles of the seriousness of the
situation was Halifax’s spirited, if piecemeal, effort to restrain
the growth of the lower houses in the early 1750’s. Symptomatic
of these efforts was the attempt to make Georgia and Nova
Scotia model royal colonies at the institution of royal govern¬
ment by writing into the instructions to their governors provisions
designed to insure the continued supremacy of the executive and
to prevent the lower houses from going the way of their counter¬
parts in the older colonies. However, the outbreak of the Seven
Years’ War forced Halifax to suspend his activities and prevented
any further reformation until the cessation of hostilities.
Indeed, the war saw a drastic acceleration in the lower houses’
bid for authority, and its conclusion found them in possession of
many of the powers held less than a century before by the
executive. In the realm of finance they had imposed their author¬
ity over every phase of raising and distributing public revenue.
They had acquired a large measure of independence by winning
control over their compositions and proceedings and obtaining
guarantees of basic English Parliamentary privileges. Finally,
they had pushed their power even beyond that of the English
House of Commons by gaining extensive authority in handling
executive affairs, including the right to appoint executive officers
and to share in formulating executive policy. These specific gains
were symptoms of developments of much greater significance.
To begin with, they were symbolic of a fundamental shift of the
constitutional center of power in the colonies from the executive
to the elected branch of the legislature. With the exception of
the Georgia and Nova Scotia bodies, both of which had less than
a decade of political experience behind them, the houses had by
1763 succeeded in attaining a new status, raising themselves
from dependent lawmaking bodies to the center of political
authority in their respective colonies.
But the lower houses had done more than simply acquire a
new status in colonial politics. They had in a sense altered the
structure of the constitution of the British Empire itself by assert¬
ing colonial authority against imperial authority and extending
the constitutions of the colonies far beyond the limitations of the
charters, instructions, or fixed notions of imperial authorities.
104 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The time was ripe for a re-examination and redefinition of the
constitutional position of the lower houses. With the rapid eco¬
nomic and territorial expansion of the colonies in the years before
1763 had come a corresponding rise in the responsibilities and
prestige of the lower houses and a growing awareness among
colonial representatives of their own importance, which had
served to strengthen their long-standing, if still imperfectly de¬
fined, impression that colonial lower houses were the American
counterparts of the British House of Commons. Under the proper
stimuli, they would carry this impression to its logical conclusion:
that the lower houses enjoyed an equal status under the Crown
with Parliament. Here, then, well beyond the embryonic stage,
was the theory of colonial equality with the mother country, one
of the basic constitutional principles of the American Revolution,
waiting to be nourished by the series of crises that beset imperial-
colonial relations between 1763 and 1776.
The psychological implications of this new political order were
profound. By the 1750"s the phenomenal success of the lower
houses had generated a soaring self-confidence, a willingness to
take on all comers. Called upon to operate on a larger stage
during the Seven Years" War, they emerged from that conflict
with an increased awareness of their own importance and a
growing consciousness of the implications of their activities.
Symptomatic of these developments was the spate of bitter con¬
troversies that characterized colonial politics during and im¬
mediately after the war. The Gadsden election controversy in
South Carolina, the dispute over judicial tenure in New York,
and the contests over the pistole fee and the two-penny act in
Virginia gave abundant evidence of both the lower houses" stub¬
born determination to preserve their authority and the failure
of Crown officials in London and the colonies to gauge accurately
their temper or to accept the fact that they had made important
changes in the constitutions of the colonies.
With the shift of power to the lower houses also came the de¬
velopment in each colony of an extraordinarily able group of
politicians. The lower houses provided excellent training for the
leaders of the rapidly maturing colonial societies, and the recur¬
ring controversies prepared them for the problems they would
be called upon to meet in the dramatic conflicts after 1763. In
the decades before Independence there appeared in the colonial
statehouses John and Samuel Adams and James Otis in Massa¬
chusetts Bay; William Livingston in New York; Benjamin Frank¬
lin and John Dickinson in Pennsylvania; Daniel Dulany the
JACK P. GREENE I 05
younger in Maryland; Richard Bland, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas
Jefferson, and Patrick Henry in Virginia; and Christopher Gads¬
den and John Rutledge in South Carolina. Along with dozens
of others, these men guided their colonies through the debate
with Britain, assumed direction of the new state governments
after 1776, and played conspicuous roles on the national stage
as members of the Continental Congress, the Confederation, and,
after 1787, the new federal government. By the 1760’s, then,
almost every colony had an imposing group of native politicians
thoroughly schooled in the political arts and primed to meet any
challenge to the power and prestige of the lower houses.
Britain’s "new colonial policy” after 1763 provided just such
a challenge. It precipitated a constitutional crisis in the empire,
creating new tensions and setting in motion forces different from
those that had shaped earlier developments. The new policy was
based upon concepts both unfamiliar and unwelcome to the
colonists such as centralization, uniformity, and orderly develop¬
ment. Yet it was a logical culmination of earlier trends and, for
the most part, an effort to realize old aspirations. From Edward
Randolph in the last decades of the seventeenth century to the
Earl of Halifax in the 1750’s colonial officials had envisioned a
highly centralized empire with a uniform political system in
each of the colonies and with the imperial government closely
supervising the subordinate governments. 30 But, because they had
never made any sustained or systematic attempt to achieve these
goals, there had developed during the first half of the eighteenth
century a working arrangement permitting the lower houses
considerable latitude in shaping colonial constitutions without
requiring crown and proprietary officials to give up any of their
ideals. That there had been a growing divergence between im¬
perial theory and colonial practice mattered little so long as each
refrained from challenging the other. But the new policy threat¬
ened to upset this arrangement by implementing the old ideals
long after the conditions that produced them had ceased to exist.
Aimed at bringing the colonies more closely under imperial con¬
trol, this policy inevitably sought to curtail the influence of the
lower houses, directly challenging many of the powers they had
®°On tins point see Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American
History (4 vols.. New Haven, 1934-1938), TV, 368—425; Michael Garibaldi
Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676—1703 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1960); Arthur H. Basye, Lords Commissioners of Trade and Planta¬
tions, 1748—1782 (New Haven, 1925); and Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the
British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New
Haven, 1960).
106 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
acquired over the previous century. To American legislators
accustomed to the lenient policies of Walpole and the Pelhams
and impressed with the rising power of their own lower houses,
the new program seemed a radical departure from precedent, a
frontal assault upon the several constitutions they had been
forging over the previous century. To protect gains they had
already made and to make good their pretensions to greater
political significance, the lower houses thereafter no longer had
merely to deal with weak governors or casual imperial admini¬
strators; they now faced an aggressive group of officials bent
upon using every means at their disposal, including the legislative
authority of Parliament, to gain their ends.
Beginning in 1763 one imperial action after another seemed
to threaten the position of the lower houses. Between 1764 and
1766 Parliament’s attempt to tax the colonists for revenue directly
challenged the colonial legislatures’ exclusive power to tax, the
cornerstone of their authority in America. A variety of other
measures, some aimed at particular colonial legislatures and
others at general legislative powers and practices, posed serious
threats to powers that the lower houses had either long enjoyed
or were trying to attain. To meet these challenges, the lower
houses had to spell out the implications of the changes they had
been making, consciously or not, in the structures of their re¬
spective governments. That is, for the first time they had to make
clear in their own minds and then to verbalize what they con¬
ceived their respective constitutions in fact were or should be.
In the process, the spokesmen of the lower houses laid bare the
wide gulf between imperial theory and colonial practice. During
the Stamp Act crisis in 1764-1766 the lower houses claimed the
same authority over taxation in the colonies as Parliament had
over that matter in England, and a few of them even asserted
an equal right in matters of internal policy. 31 Although justified
by the realities of the colonial situation, such a definition of the
lower houses’ constitutional position within the empire was at
^See the sweeping claim of the Virginia House of Burgesses to the “Inesti¬
mable Right of being governed by such Laws respecting their internal Polity
and Taxatior as are devised from their own Consent” in objecting to Gren¬
ville’s proposed stamp duties. Henry R. Mcllwaine and John P. Kennedy
(eds.). Journals of the House of Burgesses in Virginia (13 vols., Richmond,
1905-1913), 1761-1765, 302-304 (December 18, 1764). The protests of all
the lower houses against the Stamp Act are conveniently collected in Ed¬
mund S. Morgan, ed.. Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the
Stamp Act Crisis , 1764-1766 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 8-17, 46-69.
JACK P. GREENE IO7
marked variance with imperial ideals and only served to increase
the determination of the home government to take a stricter tone.
This determination was manifested after the repeal of the Stamp
Act by Parliament's claim in the Declaratory Act of 1766 to “full
power and authority" over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever." 32
The pattern over the next decade was on the part of the home
government one of increasing resolution to deal firmly with
the colonies and on the part of American lawmakers a heightened
consciousness of the implications of the constitutional issue and
a continuously rising level of expectation. In addition to their
insistence upon the right of Parliament to raise revenue in the
colonies, imperial officials also applied, in a way that was in¬
creasingly irksome to American legislators, traditional instru¬
ments of royal control like restrictive instructions, legislative re¬
view, the governors' power to dissolve the lower houses and the
suspending clause requiring prior approval of the Crown before
laws of an “extraordinary nature” could go into effect. Finally
Parliament threatened the very existence of the lower houses by
a measure suspending the New York Assembly for refusing to
comply with the Quartering Act in 1767 and by another altering
the substance of the Massachusetts constitution in the Massachu¬
setts Government Act in 1774. In the process of articulating and
defending their constitutional position, the lower houses acquired
aspirations well beyond any they had had in the years before
1763. American representatives became convinced in the decade
after 1766 not only that they knew best what to do for their
constituents and the colonies and that anything interfering with
their freedom to adopt whatever course seemed necessary was an
intolerable and unconstitutional restraint but also that the only
security for their political fortunes was in the abandonment of
their attempts to restrict and define Parliamentary authority in
America and instead to deny Parliament’s jurisdiction over them
entirely by asserting their equality with Parliament under the
Crown. Suggested by Richard Bland as early as 1766, such a
position was openly advocated by James Wilson and Thomas
Jefferson in 1774 and was officially adopted by the First Conti¬
nental Congress when it claimed for Americans in its declarations
and resolves “a free and exclusive power of legislation in their
several provincial legislatures, where their right of representation
^anby Pickering, ed.. The Statutes at Large from Magna Carta to the
End of the Eleventh Parliament of Great Britain, Anno 1761, Continued to
1806 (46 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1762-1807), XXVII, 19-20.
108 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation and internal
polity” 33
Parliament could not accept this claim without giving up the
principles it had asserted in the Declaratory Act and, in effect,
abandoning the traditional British theory of empire and accepting
the colonial constitutional position instead. The First Continental
Congress professed that a return to the status quo of 1763 would
satisfy the colonies, but Parliament in 1774—1776 was unwilling
even to go that far, much less to promise them exemption from
Parliamentary taxation. Besides, American legislators now aspired
to much more. James Chalmers, Maryland planter and later
loyalist who was out of sympathy with the proceedings of
American patriots between 1774 and 1776, correctly charged that
American leaders had ‘"been constantly enlarging their views,
and stretching them beyond their first bounds, till at length they
have wholly changed their ground.” 34 Edward Rutledge, young
delegate from South Carolina to the First Continental Congress,
was one who recognized that the colonies would not “be satisfied
with a restoration of such rights only, as have been violated
since the year ’63, when we have as many others, as clear and
indisputable, that will even then be infringed.” 35 The simple fact
was that American political leaders, no matter what their profes¬
sions, would not have been content to return to the old in articu¬
lated and ambiguous pattern of accommodation between imperial
theory and colonial practice that had existed through most of the
period between 1689 and 1763. They now sought to become
masters of their own political fortunes. Rigid guarantees of
colonial rights and precise definitions of the constitutional rela¬
tionship between the mother country and the colonies and be¬
tween Parliament and the lower houses on American terms—that
is, imperial recognition of the autonomy of the lower houses in
local affairs and of the equality of the colonies with the mother
country—would have been required to satisfy them.
No analysis of the charges in the Declaration of Independence
can fail to suggest that the preservation and consolidation of the
rights and powers of the lower houses were central in the struggle
with Britain from 1763 to 1776, just as they had been the most
^Worthington C. Ford and others, eds.. Journals of the Continental Con¬
gress (34 vols., Washington, 1904-1937), I, 68-69 (October 14, 1774).
^Candidus [James Chalmers], Plain Truth: Addressed to the Inhabitants of
America (London, 1776), 46.
^Rutledge to Ralph Izard, Jr., October 29, 1774, in A. I. Deas, ed., Corre¬
spondence of Mr. Ralph Izard of South Carolina (New York, 1844), 22-23.
JACK P. GREENE IOQ
important issue in the political relationship between Britain and
the colonies over the previous century and a half. Between 1689
and 1763 the lower houses’ contests with royal governors and
imperial officials had brought them political maturity, a con¬
siderable measure of control over local affairs, capable leaders,
and a rationale to support their pretensions to political power
within the colonies and in the Empire. The British challenge after
1763 threatened to render their accomplishments meaningless
and drove them to demand equal rights with Parliament and
autonomy in local affairs and eventually to declare their inde¬
pendence. At issue was the whole political structure forged by
the lower houses over the previous century. In this context the
American Revolution becomes in form, if not in essence, a war for
political survival, a conflict involving not only individual rights
as traditionally emphasized by historians of the event but assem¬
bly rights as well.
THE INTELLECTUAL
FRAMEWORK
Two aspects of the ideological and psychological
framework from which colonial Americans viewed the
critical events occurring after 1763 are discussed in the
selections below. The first of these examines the differ¬
ing uses of the term British Empire on opposite sides of
the Atlantic in the 1750’s and 1760’s, shows how these
uses reveal a profound divergence between Great Britain
and the colonies about the current and future role of the
colonies in the British political community, and suggests
how that divergence contributed to the breakdown in
imperial-colonial communications between 1763 and
1776. The second selection reconstructs and analyzes the
implications of many of the more important values,
assumptions, and explicit ideas that gave shape and
coherence to colonial political life on the eve of the
Revolution and conditioned the colonial reaction to both
the debate with Britain and the internal political pres¬
sures that were by-products of that debate.
Best known for his studies in medieval history and
political semantics, richard koebner (1885-1958) was
a professor at Breslau University until his expulsion
from that post during the Nazi regime. He then became
Professor of Modem History at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, a post which he held until he retired in 1955.
RICHARD BUEL, jr. (b. 1933) is a member of the Depart¬
ment of History at Wesleyan University.
no
RICHARD KOEBNER III
Two Conceptions of Empire
RICHARD KOEBNER
"Trade, shipping, the Navy—not colonization—were the true
imperial interests of Englishmen in the hundred years after the
restoration of Charles II/ 1 This statement of C. E. Carrington
refers to the time from the second Act of Navigation to ‘the
Reduction of Quebec’, a whole period in the history of British
overseas interests. We have seen how, in the course of that
century, the name "British Empire’ acquired a place in the
English language and in British political consciousness. We have
noticed that its main connotation was in fact ‘trade, shipping
and the Navy\ and that the colonies figured only occasionally in
its emphatic use. We have finally shown that the failure of the
War of Jenkin’s Ear adversely influenced its popularity towards
the end of the period. From the end of the Seven Years War all
this changed. The notion of the British Empire became a main
topic of public opinion within the English-speaking world. After
the Peace of Paris it had a particular appeal to citizens of the
American mainland colonies. To them it had first of all a special
bearing on the relations between themselves and the mother
country. In the rising conflict the British Empire was felt to be
at stake by the apologists of colonial liberty as well as by those
of metropolitan authority. The name was to acquire a new attrac¬
tive power in the course of the events which led to the dismem¬
berment of the Empire that had been built up in America.
In view of these future vicissitudes we should do well to glance
at the last decades preceding the Seven Years War. Two attitudes
towards the inter-relation of the two concepts, ‘the Colonies’ (or
‘the Plantations’) and ‘the British Empire’, can be seen. The
colonies were not ‘the Empire’ in the eyes of the British officials
who dealt with their affairs. To American colonists the two
concepts were already linked.
The Board of Trade and Plantations, established in 1696, was
concerned, according to its instructions, with ‘the plantations, not
only with regard to the administration of government, but also
in relation to commerce, and the manner in which those colonies
Reprinted with permission from Empire (England: Cambridge University
Press, 1961), 85-89, 93-94, 101-107, 115, 325-330.
*C. E. Carrington, The British Overseas (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), p. 68.
112 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
could be rendered most beneficial to this Kingdom’. The identifi¬
cation of these interests with that of the British Empire would
not have occurred to its members and officials. One of the latter,
Thomas Pownall—the ‘Governor PownalT of later years—showed
in 1752 that to him the concept of ‘empire’ was in no way related
to his official duties. He defined it anew in some reflections on
government in general, which he published under the title:
Principles of Policy, being the Grounds and Reasons of Civil
Empire. The book has nothing to do with colonies. It deals with
‘civil empire’ in the abstract, meaning the efficient functioning of
administration. The expression, as well as the basic theory
applied to it, axe derived from James Harrington’s Oceana. To
Pownall it is an axiom that ‘Property and its influence will always
have the Ballance of Power and Authority’. Deviating widely
from Harrington, he draws decesive inferences from this principle,
not in the sphere of constitutional arrangements, but in that of
a dm i n istrative discipline. Beneficial government depends on the
collective wisdom of property owners. They must co-operate like
some engine and machine, the silk-mills for instance, where a
one common great first movement is communicated and distribu¬
ted thro’ the whole’. The idea expressed in this metaphor might be
denoted also by a well-known term which still needs to be rightly
interpreted— Imperimn or ‘Empire’. This modelling the people
into various orders, and subordination of orders . . . and acting
under that direction as a one whole is what the Romans called
by the peculiar word Imperium, to express which particular group
of ideas we have no word in English but by adopting the word
Empire.’ The author attempts to support this assertion by classical
quotations, 2 but in truth it is wholly his own. He experimented
freely with the notion of empire, which he could not have done
if his superiors and colleagues at the Board of Trade and Planta¬
tions had ever spoken of the British Empire as of the sphere of
their authority. There was no such tradition.
Townall, Principles, especially pp. 51, 91-4. The author quotes Seneca,
De dementia , 1, 4, 1—Tmpeiium reruin vinculum, per quod respublica
cohaeref hut overlooks the fact that the ‘cohesive* power is attributed
there to the imperator , not to some civic imperium. At another time he
refers to Tacitus, Agricola 3, where the original text has Nerva Caesar res
olim dissociabiles miscuerit, principatum ac libertatem’. Following Bacon
and Bolingbroke, Pownall misquotes ‘res olim insociabiles, imperium et
libertatem’. Disraeli, as is well known, fell into the same trap in Ms speech
on agricultural distress in 1851, and in his Guildhall address of 1879 Cf
J\5^ yP f lmy *** G ‘ K Buckle > Li f e of Disraeli (6 vols., New York'
f’ P- I? 99 ’ PP - ®5!>> 1367. On the Ciceronian imperium. et
hbertas see above, ch. 1 , p. 3 .
BICHARD KOEBNER 113
This could have happened if the central authorities had heeded
entreaties which occasionally reached them from overseas. In
1736 the Council and Assembly of South Carolina addressed the
King on the grave apprehension aroused in them by the policies
of their new southern neighbours, the colonists of Georgia. They
humbly asked His Majesty not to let these newcomers encroach
on their own colony of more than seventy years’ standing, whose
founders had been moved with a pious and laudable zeal for the
propagating of the Christian Faith and knowledge, and enlarging
the British Empire and Dominions (at their no small expense
and hazard and without any burthen or charge to the Crown or
Kingdom)’. They believed that their colony had been "of some
advantage to Great Britain not only in the consumption of their
woollen and other manufactures but also in the extension of the
British trade and Empire several hundred miles among the native
Indians’. 3 By claiming to be pioneers of the British Empire the
petitioners manifestly, but vainly, expected to impress their
provincial interests on the home authorities. In 1740 and 1743
John Ashley of Barbados 4 addressed to these authorities Memoirs
and Considerations concerning the Trade and Revenues of the
British Colonies in America. While in the first series of these
Memoirs the author introduced his recommendations only as
"proposals for rendering those colonies more beneficial to Great
Britain’, he struck a more elevated note on the title-page of the
continuation of 1743. Here he undertook to show how "the Traffick,
Wealth and Strength of the whole may thereby be greatly in¬
creased’. Having reiterated this assertion in the preface, 5 he
closed his Memoirs with a chapter "On the trade, situation and
strength of the British Empire, as one body, with a tendency to
its colonies’. The reflections introduced by this heading are eulo¬
gistic rather than economic. "No nation in the world is more
commodiously situated for trade or war than the British Empire,
taking all together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, and
s Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies,
1735-1736; no. 4831, p. 368.
4 On his former advocacy that sugar should be an 'unenumerated com¬
modity’ cf. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739—1763
(Oxford, 1936), p. 80 n., Cal. S.P., Col. Series 1733, no. 349. On the financial
misfortunes between 1735 and 1736 which made him go into hiding and
almost cost him his councillorship in Barbados, see Cal. S.P. for these years,
nos. 183, 188, 395 f., 399, 493 f.
B ‘And such advantages are here pointed at with remarks on the conse¬
quences that may attend the whole British Empire, as well in regard to its
naval force as otherwise, from a tender care of its colonies and fisheries in
America’ (vol. II, pp. Av, A2). VlWr » ,
^ LIBRARY
I 14 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the Plantations and fisheries in America, besides its possessions
in the East Indies and Africa.’ The mother country with its natural
wealth, its maritime power and its industrious people is eloquently
praised. Great Britain is presented as the majestic emporium
mediating between the foreign Dominions of Europe, and the
other branches of the British Empire’. As a result of this position
the large surplusage that arises from the profits of the junior
branches of this great empire, and particularly from its planta¬
tions and fisheries in America’, cannot but result in 'a large an¬
nual addition to the stock and wealth of this elder branch of the
whole body. 6 Half a century earlier Edward Littleton of Barbados
had complained that the English Empire in America was not
fairly appreciated in the mother country. His younger compatriot,
John Ashley, writing in 1743, assumed that the idea of one
British Empire, with promising younger branches overseas, ought
to be an inspiration to the nation at home.
The same conviction had formed in the mind of Benjamin
Franklin. It found expression in the enthusiastic predictions of
his essay of 1751: the Observations concerning the Increase of
Mankind, Peopling of Countries etc. There are supposed to be
now upwards of one million English souls in North America. . . .
This million doubling, suppose, but once in twenty-five years will
in another century be more than the people of England, and
the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the
water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea
as well as land I What increase of trade and navigation! What
numbers of ships and seamen.’ 7 In this vision, the idea of a
greater England growing by colonization is linked to the inter¬
pretation of ‘the British Empire’ proclaimed in the verses of Prior
and Thomson—trade, ships and seamen. The maritime interpre¬
tation of the term was not reserved for poetry. It was adopted by
Franklin, a man of alert common sense, as an adequate expression
®VoL II, pp. 94-96. The chapter closes with a renewed discussion of the
specific West Indian interest which was earlier treated along with that of
the Northern colonies (‘shipbuilding, com pitch, tar* etc.), adding ‘some
few remarks on the advantages that would accrue to this empire, if those
junior branches of it, the Sugar Islands, should be raised to such a pitch,
as to make only double the quantity of sugar. Rum, and molasses, they do
now\
7 Albert H. Smyth, ed.. Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1905-
1907), II, pp. 205-208, Sect. 22. Franklin’s jealous concern for the
E ngl ish character of the colonies is expressed in Sect. 23, where he objects
to the expanding settlements of the Palatine Boers, ‘who will shortly be
so numerous as to germanize us instead of our anglifying them’. Sect. 24
adds Franklin’s curious views on race; the English and the Saxons ‘make
the principal body of white people on the face of the earth’.
RICHARD KOEBNER II 5
for his Anglo-American national and even racial pride. It had
a special appeal to him because his countrymen, 'privateers in
the late war’, had acquired a share in this maritime glory by their
conquest of Louisburg. The British Empire by land", which was
to win shape in America, was a still more fascinating reality to
him, and he expected his feelings to be shared in the mother
country.
These single instances of colonials who made the British
Empire a symbol of their belief in the future of British America 8
must not be taken as evidence of a literary convention. It was
possible fervently to proclaim 'the glory of Britain" on American
soil without recourse to the notion of 'empire". 9 It is only as indi¬
vidual utterances that the few passages to which we can refer
have documentary value. They show that to men who took an
active part in shaping the future of Anglo-American society the
notion of the British Empire became a symbol of the new possi¬
bilities to which they looked forward.
The idea of a greater England, which Benjamin Franklin and
other Americans implied when speaking of the British Empire,
was borne out by many features of their everyday life which
reminded them of their national origin. There were family ties,
business relations, and cultural interests; there was jealous pride
in the constitutional privileges which were the English birthright.
But while British origin was a live issue to many colonists, there
was no apparent reason for many Britons to have reciprocal
feelings of relationship towards the colonists in general. People
living in Britain had less occasion to think of the colonies, and
®A fourth testimony, not quite as expressive, may be taken from a state¬
ment of 1736 concerning the notorious malpractices of Rhode Island ship¬
pers in the West Indian Trade. ‘These practices will never be put an end to
till Rhode Island is reduced to the subjection of the British Empire; of
which at present it is no more a part than the Bahama Islands were, when
they were invaded by the Buccaneers.’ This sentence has been quoted by
M. W. Jemegan, The American Colonies 1492-1750, p. 380 (and from there
by H. U. Faulkner, American Economic History, 7th ed. [19541, P- 78), in a
context which makes it appear to be taken from a report of the Board of
Trade. There is no such report in the relevant volume of the Cal. S.P.
Whatever the source, the remark probably originated from an observer in
the colonies.
9 Cf. the phraseology of Archibald Kennedy’s fervent warning against
French encroachments in North America and further mismanagement of
relations with the Indians, written in 1754 for the benefit of the Albany
conference; Serious Considerations on the Present State of the Affairs of the
Northern Colonies, especially pp. 3, 5 f., 15.
Il6 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
in that small minority who had occasion, the number who be¬
longed to refined society was certainly very small. The imaginative
effort needed for a sympathetic approach to the colonies was
obstructed for many by unpleasant impressions of colonial
morals. 10 Such impressions were, in fact, justified only in relation
to certain groups of colonists—convicts who had been ‘sent to the
plantations’, smugglers and pirates, cruel slave-drivers, reckless
traders, and pioneers of the westward movement who had alien¬
ated the native Indians. Actual experience or mere report of these
elements was, however, bound to reduce the respectability of
colonial society as a whole in the eyes of the many Englishmen
who were convinced of their own higher cultural standards. . . .
The name of the British Empire was invoked in 1757 ... by
a critic whose strictures also became superseded by the events
of the war. Malachi Postlethwayt, the assiduous collector of infor¬
mation and advice for the use of merchants and regulators of
mercantile affairs, took stock of ‘Britain’s Commercial Interests’.
While the French in his opinion still held the military ascend-
ancy, he enlarged on suggestions for getting the better of them
in commercial rivalry. He hoped first to make Ireland a contrib¬
uting factor to British productivity. For the American colonies
he urged administrative reforms that would help them ‘recover
their strength and stability, and become a match for our enemies’.
Both suggestions implied far-reaching constitutional innovations.
His schemes were quite properly summed up as making ‘the whole
British Empire’ ‘a complete union’. 11 Postlethwayt was one of the
first to elevate the term to the status of a political idea. Never¬
theless, his projects of union cannot bear comparison with those
of the men of America—Benjamin Franklin, Governor Bernard,
and James Otis. He hoped to restore ‘the security, the prosperity
and the glory of the British Empire’ by high-handed administra¬
tive measures, none of them built upon a real knowledge of the
As is well known, most people wishing to emigrate to the colonies were
supposed to be *a burden to the public’ at home, not only by Charles
Davenant, who thought them potential criminals, but also still by Joshua
Gee, who classed them among ‘the poor’. Cf. K. E. Knorr, British Colonial
Theories (Toronto, 1944), pp. 75 f.
Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (London, 1757),
2nd ed., unchanged (1759), under the title Great Britain’s Commercial
quotations especially refer to ‘Dissertations’ II,
pp ' 56, 273, 277f '> ^ 289 ’ 328 > 420 f ->
RICHARD KOEBNER 117
societies which he wished to unite. He started from the mercan¬
tilist obsession that Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies "do all,
more or less, interfere with England in her native produce and
in some of her staple manufactures, and these distinct parts of
the British Empire do also greatly interfere in their produce and
fabrics with each other’. In the course of his writing, the wish to
"undersell’ France won the upper hand over the guiding principle,
which was to "restrain’ Ireland. He thought that this aim might
be achieved if agriculture in Ireland were improved by British
landowners, and if manufactures, especially woollens, were en¬
couraged there by the permission of exports. Both measures
together would make the joint produce of the two kingdoms in¬
vincibly cheap on foreign markets. "An universal spirit of industry
and ingenuity will spread itself through the whole British Empire
and rouse and animate our traders of every rank to vie with and
excel those of the whole world.’ The Irish, viewing their improved
position, would gratify the English "seat of empire’ by paying
half their commercial gains into the British exchequer and by
allowing their island to become "an English Protestant country
like Wales and Scotland’.
As for the North American colonies, the watchwords "union’
and "empire’ had a different meaning. They did not refer to an
equalization of commercial rights but to an enforcement of strict
discipline. The system of Government in America must be regu¬
lated by the mother-government system.’ The present state of the
colonies showed the reverse of that principle; the author saw
them as "members lopped from the body politic’. Some of them—
all those which were proprietary or had elected councils or even
elected governors—were constitutionally encouraged in disobedi¬
ence. In all of them, metropolitan control of provincial legislation
was nullified by the delay in getting reports to London and in¬
structions from it. Governors were guilty of negligence and arbi¬
trariness. The colonists had proved lukewarm . . . to their own
safety and welfare’, and allowed the people of England to be
"encumbered with taxes’ on their behalf. They tended "to hang
forever on the breast of their mother-country’. At the same time
they had been permitted to occupy more land than they could
cultivate, and this impaired the security of their frontiers, whose
fortification they had also neglected. Their greatest sin against
their own safety and British interests generally was that they
had forfeited "the steady alliance and friendship of the Indian
nations’. They had ‘defrauded them by dishonest ways and
measures’ and had estranged their better elements by the abomi-
Il8 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nable practice of ‘intoxicating their people with our spirituous
liquors ... the better to deceive them".
These instances of laxness on the part of the British authorities
and of immorality on the part of the colonists were, in Postle-
thwayt’s opinion, responsible for the war and its unlucky course.
The French had proved thoughtful and efficient in every respect
in which the British had proved wanting. They controlled immi¬
gration, ‘not permitting any person to take up more land than he
shall actually plant and manure within a limited time’. They
‘pique themselves on treating the Indians with the strictest regard
to truth, integrity, and honour’ and ‘they treat them with small
wines, to preserve their sobriety’. Moreover, they had encircled
the disunited British colonies with a unified framework of co¬
ordinated administration extending from Canada to Louisiana. In
their principle of centralised organization, Postlethwayt saw the
remedy for ah the British deficiencies. Let all the colonies ... be
united under a legal, regular and firm establishment, settled and
determined by the wisdom of a British legislature . . . after which,
why should not a lord lieutenant-general be constituted and ap¬
pointed, by the crown of England, as supreme governor over these
colonies, to act in subordination to the voice of a British parlia¬
ment?’ The governor might be assisted by ‘a great council, or
general convention of the estates of the colonies, to which each
province could annually elect two deputies. In America it meant
‘to determine upon such a union in government and constitution
of every part of its dominions as may tend to strengthen the whole
British Empire’. Such measures ‘will in all probability revive the
present sinking state of the British Empire’.
There is a faint analogy with the criticisms and demands and
suggestions of reform which had been discussed in Albany three
years earlier. While that conference discussed concerted organi¬
zation on the Indian frontier only, Postlethwayt wanted to see
established an overruling authority capable in the last resort of
executing policies laid down in Westminster. Like his project for
Ireland, this was a hazily conceived idea, for whose transforma¬
tion into administrative reality the author himself would make
no suggestion. The circumstances in which it might have ap¬
peared practicable to the British authorities and acceptable to
the colonies can scarcely be imagined. No moment could have
been less auspicious for the scheme than 1759, the year of the
re-issue of thei book. Pitt’s strategy had triumphed; Quebec was
taken. The assertion that the British colonial system could not
stand up to the French had been refuted. Nobody could believe
RICHARD IOEBNER Iig
that the British Empire in America had too many inhabitants. A
constitutional project which was so manifestly at variance with
colonial self-righteousness and self-reliance was forthwith put out
of court. Nevertheless, in its critical passages PostLethwayfs argu¬
ment contained an element which was later to be given fatal
emphasis on the British side. It made colonial society appear to
be in need of lessons in disciplinary conduct—not, as the poet
Dyer wished to present it, a British offspring of moral promise.
The experiences accumulated in North America during the last
years of the war and shortly after: haggling about requisitions,
smuggling, trading with the enemy, continued maltreatment of
Indians which finally provoked them to revolt, all added to the
distrust to which the author of Britain's Commercial Interest had
given vent. British resentment at ‘ingratitude" on the one hand,
and the buoyant self-confidence which the colonists derived from
the conquest of Canada on the other—these were the conflicting
ways in which constitutional interpretations of the British Empire
revived and found wide acceptance, when those attempted by
Malachi Posdethwayt were forgotten.
At the time when Britain drifted into the war which was to be
decisive for its empire overseas, there was one man only for
whom the name of empire evoked a vision of new social realities
which demanded political wisdom. He was Benjamin Franklin,
printer, popular moralist, and amateur scientist of Philadelphia.
In his Observations, written in 1751 and published in 1753, he
tried to create a literary public which would give thought to ques¬
tions concerning the increase of mankind, the policies of trade,
and the distribution of races on the earth. Only in passing did he
refer to the political difficulty which interfered with the fulfilment
of his dreams: ‘How important an affair then to Britain is the
present treaty [of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1749] for settling the bounds
between the Colonies and the French . . . since on the room
depends so much the increase of her people." He was well aware
of the weakness of the frontier beyond the Alleghanies and, like
the British governors, understood that only the voluntary co¬
operation of the colonies concerned could offer a remedy. In 1754
he had the opportunity of making constructive suggestions in
this respect. He submitted a plan of concerted action in matters
of defence and Indian affairs to the conference of governors and
colonial representatives held at Albany, on instructions from
120 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
London. His suggestions were welcomed by the participants, but
were held to be unacceptable commitments by London, as well
as by the colonial assemblies. The idea which matured in Frank¬
lin’s mind on that occasion was that the home country and the
colonies should enter upon far-reaching mutual commitments.
His vision of the British Empire transformed itself into a scheme
of constitutional reform. We do not know whether he spoke of
the Empire at Albany. But his mind was fixed upon that idea
when late in the same year Governor Shirley of Massachusetts
sought his advice as to the conclusions to be drawn from the
failure of the conference. As the military initiative had now
clearly become the exclusive responsibility of the British govern¬
ment, Shirley was anxious to make sure that expenses would be
repaid by the colonies. He made two suggestions; that the colonies
should be taxed by the British central authorities, and that
they should have representation in Parliament, in order that tax¬
ation should be more tolerable. Franklin sharply deprecated the first
suggestion and was very sympathetic to the second. On both points
the concept of the British Empire proved essential for his argu¬
ment.
One cannot but admire the style of his answers. They are
calculated to impress the governor by detached objectivity as
much as by warm professions of enthusiasm for the common
English cause of the Empire. These professions originate in
Franklin’s sincere feeling; but he suggests that they are also in
the hearts of his countrymen. Franklin knows his twofold role—
to show himself as a man of enlightened views and at the same
time to impersonate the average American. The questions of levy¬
ing taxes by Act of Parliament was, he told Shirley, to be exam¬
ined according to what the people ‘will be apt to think’, apart
from ‘what they ought to think’. Therefore it mattered ‘that it is
suppos’d an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but
by their own consent given thro’ their representatives’. It was
also important to remember that, owing to the regulation of
colonial trade, ‘our whole centres finally amongst the merchants
of Britain.’ To pay immediate heavy taxes’—in addition to these
objectionable ‘secondary taxes’—must ‘seem hard measure to
Englishmen, who cannot conceive, that by hazarding their lives
and fortunes in subduing and settling new countries, extending
the Dominion, and increasing the commerce of their mother
nation, they have forfeited the native rights of Britons. . . .’ Sig¬
nificantly it is in connection with this warning that Franklin
introduces his favourite topic. The American ‘Englishman’, he
RICHARD KOEBNER 121
maintains, would tell those of Great Britain "that the British
Colonies bordering on the French are properly frontiers of the
British Empire; and the frontiers of an empire are properly de¬
fended at the joint expense of the body of the people in such an
empire’.
Shirley’s second suggestion, that the colonies be directly repre¬
sented in Parliament, compelled Franklin to concede that his
compatriots too had much to learn concerning their obligations
to the Empire. "Such a union’, he ventured to say, "would be very
acceptable to the colonies’; but he thought it one of its probable
merits that "the people of Great Britain, and the people of the
colonies, would learn to consider themselves, as not belonging to
a different community with different interests, but to one com¬
munity with one interest’. By adding that this outcome would
"greatly lessen the danger of future separations’ he allowed his
mind to dwell on such awkward contingencies as had sometimes
haunted legislators at Westminster, since the Staple Act of 1663. 12
But in contrast with their belief in mercantile restrictions he
proposed the daring experiment of putting "all the old Acts of
Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufactures of
the colonies’, together with the new union, to the test of popular
consent on the part of the colonies. All these Acts were to be
repealed, and "the new Parliament representing the whole’ was
to be free to decide whether it was in "the interest of the whole
to re-enact some or all of them’. Combining all these suggestions,
he gave his personal opinion:
Now I look on the Colonies as so many countries gained by Great
Britain, . . . and being separated by the ocean, they increase much
more its shipping and seamen; and since they are all included in the
British Empire, which has only extended itself by their means, . . .
what imports it to the general state, whether a merchant, a smith, or
a hatter, grow rich in Old or New England? . . . And if there be any
difference, those who have most contributed to enlarge Britain’s empire
and commerce . . . ought rather to expect some preference . 13
Again, "shipping and seamen—empire and commerce’. To Ben¬
jamin Franklin the "British Empire’ retained its "maritime’ con-
“Eirmer dependence 7 of the plantations upon the kingdom of England
was mentioned in the Staple Act (15 Ch. II, c. 7) as one of its intended
0 *fPc c t s
^Writings, Smyth, ed.. Ill, pp. 231-241. Cf. Veraer W. Crane, Benjamin
Franklin, Englishman and American (Baltimore, 1936), pp. 82—85, and
Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, 1758—1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1950), Doc. 32, p. 65.
122 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
notation even while he concentrated on its continental future in
America.
In his Observations of 1751, which as often as possible he had
reprinted, he tried to communicate his vision of the new English
world in America which, in foreseeable time, was bound to out¬
grow that of the maternal island. This vision was to him almost
identical with a constitutional postulate. In the last resort it was
America, and the America of the future more than that of the
present, which would bring the British Empire into being. The
name of the British Empire stood for that vision. Though grounded
in the English tradition and nationality to which he emphatically
paid allegiance, the British Empire which he wanted to see
respected was an American creation. Englishmen were in duty
bound to prepare for its coming by a reasonable attitude to
current reality. . . .
Democracy and the American Revolution:
A Frame of Reference
RICHARD BUEL, Jr.
American historians have never been famous for agreement,
but in one respect they seem curiously united. All have tried to
measure the significance of the Revolution in relation to the
development of American democracy. However, beyond the limits
of this initial premise their unity dissolves into a rich multiplicity
of interpretations. Such a state of affairs is not necessarily to be
lamented, for the diversity of opinions has helped to illuminate
the complexity of our Revolutionary experience.
There is a point, though, where multiplicity ceases to enlighten
and instead merely creates confusion. We are approaching, though
we may not yet have reached, that point on the question of
Reprinted from The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXI, 2 (April,
1964), 165-190. Copyright © 1964 by Richard Buel, Jr. Reprinted with
permission.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 123
whether or not the Revolution was a democratic movement. While
it is impossible, and even undesirable, to have complete agreement
on the substance of interpretations, to be still debating such a
fundamental question indicates a critical weakness in our knowl¬
edge. The crux of our confusion lies more in the realm of intel¬
lectual history than in institutional history. After almost a cen¬
tury and a half of historical speculation, we are still not agreed
on the democratic nature of Revolutionary ideas, let alone on
precisely what “democratic” changes took place in American
thinking between 1760 and 1789.
The problem transcends simple divergencies in individual points
of view and relates more fundamentally to the methods employed.
Our confusion in the realm of ideas stems largely from the reluc¬
tance of historians to define a point of departure in historical
context. Because we have failed to clarify the manner in which
mid-eighteenth-century Americans viewed the people’s role in the
polity, it has been difficult to interpret the significance of insti¬
tutional and intellectual changes throughout the Revolutionary
period.
The institution of representation serves as a useful illustration
both because it was subject to rigorous scrutiny during the Revo¬
lution and because it has been traditionally associated with de¬
mocracy. The colonists themselves referred to their representative
assemblies as the democratic branch of their constitutions. But
were they using the word “democratic” in the same context we
use it today? Though modem representative institutions are
popularly regarded as the principal mechanism through which
the people express their will in politics, this does not mean they
were viewed in the same light by the Revolutionary generation
almost two centuries ago. If, in fact, representation was conceived
to perform quite a different function, then the meaning of such
institutional developments as the extension or contraction of the
franchise may have to be reassessed.
What we need, then, is an imaginative reconstruction of the
values and assumptions as well as the explicit ideas of colonial
political thought immediately prior to the Revolution. Generally
American historians have dismissed such an enterprise as im¬
practical. They have assumed that American political ideas were
unformed or ambiguous at the beginning of the imperial crisis
and that colonial thought remained inchoate until the eve of
independence. Confirmation for this view has been sought in
the instability of the colonists’ ideas about the jurisdiction of
Parliament throughout the first decade of crisis. The assumption
124 REINTERPRETATION of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that American thought started from no fixed point and achieved
no uniform expression until independence has made it difficult
to define with precision the meaning of its development through¬
out the Revolutionary era.
It is possible, however, that American historians have unduly
despaired of defining a point of departure from which to assess
the meaning of the Revolutionary experience. Though colonial
leaders differed in their initial definitions of Parliament’s power,
in a more fundamental sense they were in basic agreement. Their
agreement sprang from their common experience within the
British imperial system which, despite the diffuse heterogeneity
of the thirteen colonies, had by 1760 given birth to a surprisingly
homogeneous leadership on the provincial scene. During the bitter
factional disputes that had infected all the colonial polities
throughout the eighteenth century, local political magnates devoid
of transatlantic connections had acquired an elaborate conceptual
arsenal from the dissenting tradition in English thought 1 with
which they sought to protect themselves from the superior power
of their adversaries.
Provincial leaders had been attracted to dissenting thought by
a combination of circumstances. For one thing a vast majority
of them shared a religious affinity with the British dissenters. But
of greater importance was the ability of this tradition to interpret
unique aspects of the American experience. If the seething fac¬
tionalism of provincial politics left many colonists disenchanted
with the exercise of political power in general, dissenting thought
was characterized by a profound distrust of all power, no matter
by whom possessed. Most important of all, however, was the fact
that these colonists occupied an analogous position to the dis¬
senters in relation to the sovereign power. Because dissenting
thought had been developed throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries by men who were excluded from the centers
of influence within the state, it had sought to enlist the resources
of a virtuous people against the potential aggressions of a hostile
a By the “dissenting tradition in English thought,” I do not mean to refer
only to the ideas of English thinkers who were nonconformists, but also to
the work of such men as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin
Hoadly, all of whom were members of the Church of England and whose
ideas, for reasons explained below, proved to be especially congenial to the
English dissenters. I call it the “dissenting tradition” only because the non¬
conformists gradually became the exclusive custodians of this strand of
th i nk i n g in Britain after 1745. For a complete description of the participants
in the dissenting tradition, see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century
Commonwealthman . . . (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), passim.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 125
sovereign. This, of course, was precisely the same situation local
colonial politicians found themselves in during the mid-eighteenth
century. In many cases they too possessed no other available re¬
source with which to defend their local autonomy than the united
support of the provincial populace.
It was also the situation which confronted all Americans simul¬
taneously when the ministry undertook to reorganize the empire
in 1763. Ironically the colonists’s initial reaction to parliamentary
taxation was not to think radically new thoughts but to apply the
familiar political ideas of the English dissenting tradition to an
unprecedented situation. If there was any change in the structure
of basic concepts, it was one of crystalization and clarification
rather than innovation as these ideas were diffused to a wider
circle. Many who had been familiar with dissenting notions but
had not been accustomed to rely on them were now forced to
appropriate them by the common jeopardy in which American
rights had been placed. At least in the substratum of fundamental
premises, if not in their precise application, the impact of crisis
produced uniformity rather than confusion, a uniformity which
was only to dissolve under the grueling strain of long years of
controversy. Even after independence the ideas and assumptions
that were characteristic of dissenting thought continued to domi¬
nate the minds of many individuals and were an important in¬
fluence in the creation of our nation’s unique political institutions.
As we have indicated, the dissenting tradition was forced to
rely heavily upon the power of the populace. But how was its
power to be applied? This paper will explore the colonists’ ideas
about the contract theory of government, the right of revolution,
and representation. These ideas were part of a systematic theory
about the role of the people in the polity which lay at the heart
of the colonists’ initial confrontation with parliamentary taxation. 2
By explicating this theory we can define an initial frame of refer¬
ence from which the “democratic” significance of subsequent
events can be more readily assessed. 3
2 One facet of the people’s power will be omitted from consideration, how¬
ever, because it was not subject to major revision during or after the Revolu¬
tion and because it is not germane to the interpretive question of whether
or not the American Revolution was a democratic movement. This is the
power of the people to participate in the execution of the law through juries.
3 As the New England clergy were instrumental in disseminating dissenting
thought to wide sectors of the population in the northern colonies, much
reliance has been placed on their political sermons. Political pamphlets
bearing directly on the imperial crisis have been the other major source
used. Whenever possible an attempt has been made to refer the reader to
relevant English sources from which the colonists derived their ideas.
136 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
I
Like ail eighteenth-century English thinkers the provincial lead¬
ership sought to control power by limiting and dividing it. What
was novel in their solutions was not the principle behind their
techniques, but the scope with which they were applied. Rather
than confine the balance of the constitution to the autonomous
composition of the supreme power, to the parliamentary com¬
ponents of King, Lords, and Commons, Americans turned to a
conception of balance between two broad, countervailing forces
in political society, the rulers and the ruled . 4 In their elaboration
of the relationship between rulers and ruled they defined ar¬
rangements whereby society might benefit from the exercise
of power without suffering from Its corresponding abuses.
By enlarging the constitutional balance to embrace not only
the rulers but also the ruled, Americans indicated that the real
lines of conflict to be anticipated within the polity were not be¬
tween the constituent parts of the supreme power but between
magistrates and people . 5 In doing so they challenged the Idea
that in a conflict of interests between rulers and ruled the subject
should passively acquiesce in the determinations of the magistrate.
Though they lamented the existence of such a conflict, they were
nonetheless willing to accord the subject’s interests a legitimacy
which the interests of power did not necessarily possess. Their
willingness to reverse the dominant presumptions of eighteenth-
century English thought did not proceed from a belief that the
people were incapable of mischief. Rather, it proceeded from a
theoretical recognition that the ruler’s peculiar position made his
power even more liable to abuse than was that of the subject.
^“Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” in Charles Francis
Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams . . . (Boston, 1851), III, 542 ff.;
Andrew Eliot, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard
. . . May 29th 1765 . . . (Boston, 1765), 8; Ebenezer Bridge, A Sermon
Preached Before His Excellency Francis Bernard . . . May 27th 1767 . . .
(Boston, 1767), 17, 51; John Tucker, A Sermon Preached at Cambridge ,
Before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson . . . May 29th 1771 . . . (Boston,
1771 ), 12, 13; Dan Foster, A Short Essay on Civil Government . . . (Hart¬
ford, 1775), 5; Peter Whitney, The Transgression of a Land Punished by a
Multitude of Rulers . . . (Boston, 1774), 10; John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 6th ed. (London, 1754), I, 184, hereafter referred to
as Cato’s Letters, all references to volumes I, III, and IV coming from the
6th ed., and all references to volume II coming from the 5th ed. (London,
1748 ).
sfiy "magistrate” I refer to any civil officer, either legislative or executive,
to whom presumptive obedience was due.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 127
By virtue of his office a ruler possessed presumptive control
over society's combined resources while the subject’s power was
confined entirely to his own person, or at most, to the resources
of those whose immediate co-operation he could secure. In a
predominantly agrarian community where groups of individuals
tended to live in isolation from one another, uninformed of each
other’s needs and opinions, it was difficult enough to get all the
people to unite in one common course of action after extensive
persuasion and virtually impossible to have them all unite spon¬
taneously. The magistrates, on the other hand, were a compact
and potentially disciplined group which constituted a formidable
force against a flock of helpless and disunited subjects. 6
Furthermore, the possession of power exposed the ruler to temp¬
tations to which the subject, by virtue of his impotence, was im¬
mune. Because of the difficulties obstructing the people’s con¬
certed action, history had demonstrated that the populace were
usually quiescent under good government and loath to stir even
when oppressed with substantial injustices. While the magistrates
in full possession of the powers of the state might not only find
it within the range of their capabilities but also to their imme¬
diate interest to erect a tyranny, that is to enhance their own
welfare at the expense of the subjects’, the people in their natu¬
rally unconnected state could rationally desire nothing else but
the public welfare in which their own personal welfare would be
maximized. Thus the people were not under such temptations to
thwart their own interests as powerful rulers were to abuse those
of the people. It was precisely because those in power were more
likely to pursue interests distinct from the common interest than
were those without power that the subject was entitled to some
means of influencing the magistrate’s actions as security against
oppression. 7
6 See William Livingston and others, The Independent Reflector, Milton M.
Klein, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 188—189.
7 Samuel Adams to Arthur Lee, April 19, 1771, in Harry Alonzo Cushing,
ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams (New York, 1904-1908), II, 164 ; “No-
vanglus; or, a History of the Dispute with America, from its origin, m 1754,
to the present time,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, IV, 14, 17, 83; Charles
Turner A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson . . .
May 26th 1773 . . . (Boston, 1773), 17; John Wingate Thornton, The Pulpit
of the American Revolution . . . (Boston, 1860), 167; The Farmer’s Letters
to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia, 1767), in The Po¬
litical Writings of John Dickinson . . . (Wilmington, 1801), I, 260—261, 261 n;
Izrahiah Wetmore, A Sermon Preached Before the Honorable General As¬
sembly of the Colony of Connecticut . . . May 13th, 1773 (New London,
1773) 24; Peter Laslett, ed., John Locke: Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge, Eng., I960), 428, 432; Cato’s Letters, I, 80, 178, 250; II, 21-22,
128 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
However, in constructing a broad balance between rulers and
ruled, all eighteenth-century thinkers had to face the problem of
how this balance could be rendered stable. The difficulty of the
task was compounded by the apparent absence of a mediating
third force, such as the House of Lords in the parliamentary
balance, and by the potentially unstable nature of the people’s
power. If you were willing to give the subject sufficient power to
maintain the legitimacy of his interests against the encroachments
of the magistrates, how could you in turn render the subject’s
power incapable of abuse?
Superficially it looked as though this problem could be bypassed.
A balance between the rights of the subject and the prerogatives
of the magistrate might be stabilized by an agreed on jurisdic¬
tional definition of the magistrate’s power. Once it was acknowl¬
edged that rulers were more likely to violate the common interest
than were subjects, was it not reasonable to endow the people
with a right to frame a constitution “as the standing measure of
the proceedings of government” for their own protection and to
solicit their ruler’s consent to it? 8 Even if there was no express
compact, “yet it has been necessarily implied, and understood,
both by governors, and the governed, on their entering into so¬
ciety.” 8 In these covenants both rulers and ruled could mark out
the fundamental law by which the rights of each would be guar¬
anteed against infringement by the other. 10 If the magistrates
transcended the formal boundaries of power delegated to them,
then and only then did the people have a right to withdraw their
obedience and ultimately to form new governments. 11
However, Americans took pains to emphasize that slight in¬
fringements of the compact would not justify a rebellion. Only
when the ruler trampled wholesale upon the rights of the subject
and violated the welfare of society was resistance justified, and
224; III, 237, 267, 284; J. L. de Lolme, The Constitution of England . . . ,
New ed. (London, 1777), 212; James Burgh, Political Disquisitions . . .
(London, 1774-1775), I, 272; III, 310, 311, 339, 379, 415.
8 Eliot, A Sermon, 18; Daniel Shute, A Sermon Preached Before His Ex¬
cellency Francis Bernard . . . May 25th 1768 . . . (Boston, 1768), 23; Thorn¬
ton, Pulpit of the American Revolution, 159; Tucker, A Sermon, 14; quota¬
tion in Turner, A Sermon, 16; Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted . . .
(New York, 1775), 6; Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the
American Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1928), 114.
9 Gad Hitchcock, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Gage
. . . May 25th, 1774 . . . (Boston, 1774), 7; Whitney, Transgression, 10.
10 Eliot, A Sermon, 19 ff.; Tucker, A Sermon, 14; Bridge, A Sermon, 17.
lx Jason Haven, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Sir Francis
Bernard . . . May 31st 1769 . . . (Boston, 1769), 34, 40; Shute, A Sermon,
46-58; Foster, Short essay, 5, 55 ff.; Whitney, Transgression, 19.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 129
then only insofar as it was necessary to preserve the rights of
the people and their welfare from destruction. 12 Until such an
emergency occurred the people were morally bound to obey the
magistrate’s commands as well as it being their interest to do
so. 13 Hopefully the existence of such a fundamental law and the
ultimate threat of revolution would preclude all emergencies and
enable the people to confine their role to obeying their superior’s
lawful commands.
But the compact theory of government enforced by the sanc¬
tions of possible revolution did not provide the subject with prac¬
tical guarantees against aggression by the magistrates. In the
first place, as was often pointed out, the magistrate’s office could
not be adequately defined by explicit reference to fundamental
laws. The extent of the magistrate’s power was determined by the
ends which his office was designed to realize. He had plenary
power for the good of society, but when he used power to society’s
detriment he was exceeding his lawful commission. What con¬
stituted the “good of the society” could not be completely antici¬
pated in a fixed law, but depended upon the changing circum¬
stances in which a society was placed. The plea which was made
during the imperial crisis by some of the New England clergy
for a clarification of the fundamental law so that neither party
could misconstrue it merely indicated the difficulties with which
this means of resolving political conflict was beset. 14
Even had the magistrate’s powers been capable of full and
complete definition, the basic problem would still have remained
of rendering such jurisdictional definitions of equilibrium real, in
other words of making these arrangements self-enforcing. Both
magistrates and subjects had an interest in guarding their rights
against each other’s encroachments. But under the compact theory
isjonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and
Non-resistance to the Higher Powers . . . (Boston, 1750), 38 n; Eliot, A Ser¬
mon, 43; Haven, A Sermon, 40; An Essay Upon Government, Adopted by
the Americans . . . (Philadelphia, 1775), 12-14; 68-72, 95; Laslett, ed.,
Locke: Two Treatises, 421.
13 Eliot, A Sermon, 41-43; Stephen White, Civil Rulers Gods by Office . . .
(New London, 1763), 22; Edward Barnard, A Sermon Preached Before His
Excellency Francis Bernard . . . May 28th. 1766 . . . (Boston, 1766), 38;
Haven, A Sermon, 37-39; "Whitney, Transgression, 15, 27; Turner, A Sermon,
32-33; Tucker, A Sermon, 18-19, 29; James Cogswell, A Sermon Preached
Before the General Assembly, of the Colony of Connecticut . . . May 9, 1771
(New London, 1771), 21; Foster, Short essay, 37; Samuel Lockwood, Civil
Rulers an Ordinance of God, for the Good to Mankind . . . (New London,
1774), 38-39.
14 Eliot, A Sermon, 43; White, Civil Rulers, 12; Tucker, A Sermon, 18;
Hitchcock, A Sermon, May 25th, 1774, 32—33.
130 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of government, once encroachments were made, the only remedy
was violence which, by obstructing the force of government, placed
the very existence of the “social fabric” in jeopardy and threat¬
ened to dissolve all into one wild tumult of confusion and
anarchy. 15
The difficulties associated with the compact theory of govern¬
ment were compounded by the fact that according to the premises
of dissenting thought, amply reinforced by colonial experience,
violations were to be anticipated from one’s rulers. But if the
magistrate violated the compact, the people were left only with
the unpalatable alternatives of submission or resistance by force.
Though a people might be perfectly justified in their resistance,
this right when exercised could as effectually destroy a free
society as would the arbitrary sway of a tyrant. If to enforce the
covenant you had to be continually breaking it, you would never
derive the benefits of it in the first place. 16 The real problem was
to prevent these encroachments from occurring. What was needed
was some special power lodged in the people, short of revolution,
with which they could peacefully restrain the misuse of political
power by their superiors.
One such peaceful restraint might be found in selective as
opposed to wholesale or violent disobedience. Eighteenth-century
thinkers persisted in emphasizing the co-operative nature of hu¬
man society. If laws were to be duly executed, the magistrate
needed the co-operation of the subject. The exercise of political
power was not the autonomous function of the ruler’s command,
but depended equally on the subject’s willingness to obey. Against
the possibility of the magistrate issuing oppressive commands
the subject always had the choice of yielding or withholding
obedience. New England election sermons continually raised the
question of when obedience was due and when it was proper to
disobey. In telling the people that obedience was a matter of
choice and that the subject should not obey the ruler’s com¬
mands blindly but only in response to his conscience, the New
England clergy was advocating a doctrine of selective disobedience
“ Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 257; Daniel
Leonard, Massachusettensis (Boston, 1775), 65; for a fuller explication of
this point see Richard Buel, Jr., Studies in the Political Ideas of the Amer¬
ican Revolution (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1962),
12-13, 16, 34-35.
“Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 170; Leonard,
Massachusettensis, 64; Essay upon Government, 73; 77-78, 84; [William
Hicks], The Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power Considered . . . (Phil¬
adelphia, 1768), 29; John J. Zubly, The Law of Liberty . . . (Philadelphia,
1775), 2.
EICHAED BTJEL, JE. 131
which would not necessarily overturn society. If their rulers
persisted in oppressing the people, might not the people withdraw
their obedience to such oppressive measures so as to deprive their
authors of all benefit from them? And might not this serve as an
admonishment to wicked rulers to return to their duty? 17
Opponents of this school of thought could legitimately object
that if obedience to the commands of a political superior was a
matter which each member of society could decide for himself,
then what security was there that society would not disintegrate
in the unrelated disobediences of private men? Such an objection
could be leveled equally at admitting the right of revolution, for
many felt selective disobedience was the practical consequence of
such an admission. Why would not this lead to anarchy? 1 ®
One could reply that conscience was not an entirely arbitrary
standard to which to appeal. 19 Men could agree on questions of
conscience, particularly when there was an objective standard
by which the lawfulness of authority was to be tested which was
independent of the subject’s will. It was the subject s duty to resist
only when the ruler acted contrary to God’s law and the consti¬
tution. But when the magistrate remained within the bounds of
his commission to rule, his authority was fortified by conscience
as well as interest, for the subject’s temporal and eternal happi¬
ness depended upon obedience to all the ruler s lawful com¬
mands. 20
However, the colonists were willing to admit that in our imper¬
fect condition men with sincere intentions could disagree on
matters of conscience. Then there was the added consideration
that depraved men unmindful of the dictates of conscience lived
in society. But Americans pointed out that the power of the
magistrate was so great in proportion to that of the populace
that only the united opposition of the people could defeat the
magistrate’s power. In any conflict an isolated subject would make
a very poor match for a magistrate armed with the power of
«Shute , A Sermon , 43, 46, 47-48, 62-63, 64; Foster, Short Essay, 38,J 39,
40, 69; Eliot, A Sermon , 41-43; Tucker, A Sermon , 37, 39, 60; Gad Hitch¬
cock, A Sermon Preached at Plymouth December 22d, 1774 . . . (Boston,
1775) 27-30; Edward Dorr, The Duty of Civil Rulers, To Be Nursing Fathers
to the Church of Christ . . . (Hartford, 1765), 33; Essay upon Government,
41 ^Essay upon Government, 12, 13-14; Jonathan Boucher, A View of the
Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution . . . (London, 1797),
515.
19 Dorr, Duty of Civil Rulers, 19. „ , _
^Eliot, A Sermon, 41-43, 45; Barnard, A Sermon, 38; Shute, A Sermon,
46-48* Turner, A Sermon, 28-29; Tucker, A Sermon, 36-37; Hitchcock, A
Sermon, May 25th, 1774, 12-13, 27; Whitney, Transgression, 17-18.
132 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the state. To counter the weight of the magistrates’ power, sub¬
jects had to act in concert, which in itself constituted a sub¬
stantial check on the people’s ability to express their will in
politics. When contemporary literature referred to the people as
a “rope of sand,” the image reflected the obstacles obstructing
their effective group action and the tendency of their potential
power to dissolve in disunity. The unrelated disobediences of
depraved men or the sincere mistakes of a few misguided souls
could not disturb the stability of society or the magistrate’s power
because their opposition, lacking a unifying principle, would not
enable them to act in a concerted fashion. Only ordered resistance
could successfully challenge the magistrates’ power and this
could spring only from a general agreement among the individual
consciences of the people that the ruler had transcended the
legitimate bounds of his authority. 21
The trouble with the idea of selective disobedience was that it
assumed the ruler could not wield the instruments of coercion
without the cooperation of the subject. While it was true that the
ruler’s power to contribute to the public good did depend on the
subject’s co-operation, and while the notion of selective disobedi-
ence might have some remedial effect so far as the operation of
oppressive laws was concerned, it could not affect the manner
in which the ruler wielded other instruments of power at his
disposal such as command of the army or control over the admin¬
istration of justice. True, the subject might push disobedience to
the point where the sinews of government had virtually dissolved
in order to destroy some of the advantages the ruler hoped to
reap from his oppression, yet when he did so selective disobedi¬
ence became in effect the right of revolution, and the people
were infinitely more vulnerable in a state of anarchy than were
their rulers. The fact that by partial resistance the subject could
diminish the benefits the ruler sought in oppression provided no
guarantee that the ruler would return to a respect for the common
interest. The only real sanction which the people possessed in
the compact theory of government was the right of revolution for
this alone could halt the march of a determined tyrant.
Eliot, A Sermon, 47; Hitchcock, A Sermon, May 25th, 1774, 24; Amos
Adams, Religious Liberty an Invaluable Blessing . . . (Boston, 1768 ) 49-
Cato's Letters, I, xxiii, 80, 180, 250; H, 224-225; HI, 70, 267, 284, 294; iv’
132; An Historical Essay on the English Constitution . . . (London, 1771 )*
15i; Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I, 272; HI, 310-311, 429; Laslett, ed.,
T ^° Treatises, 422; Benjamin Hoadly, The Original and Institution
of Cwu Government, Discuss'd (London, 1710), 249 (numbered 49) 326
(numbered 126).
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 133
While colonial thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century were
perfectly aware of the limitations and abuses to which the right
of revolution might be put, they continued to affirm it, both as a
last resort and because power exercised without the threat of
this right was liable to even greater abuse. Acknowledgement of
the right of resistance protected rulers as well as subjects because
it helped to prevent the evil of the magistrate’s encroachments
in the first place, and thus ultimately protected rulers from the
wrath of the populace. 22 But it provided no guarantee, and as a
remedy was likely to prove worse than the disease. 23 For the
practical maintenance of a stable constitutional balance between
rulers and ruled the people needed subtler and more discrimi¬
nating means of persuading their superiors to respect their rights.
What more acceptable techniques could be devised for protecting
the subject from the overwhelming power of the magistrates
which were not equally liable to abuse? 24
II
The contract theory of government was plagued by two essen¬
tial weaknesses. The first related to the inflexible and unprecise
nature of the fundamental law; the second to the procedure of
enforcement. Both could be obviated through the institution of
representation.
Despite its recognized limitations, eighteenth-century Americans
continued to regard the law as an essential device in demarcating
the boundary between the rights of the subject and the preroga¬
tives of the magistrate: If power were confined within the chan¬
nels the law had marked out for its circulation, the subject—
provided his behavior conformed to certain pre-established stand¬
ards—would have security that the power of the magistrate would
not affect him. 25 The security that the law might afford in turn
Hitchcock, A Sermon, May 25th, 1774, 23, 25; Turner, A Sermon, 28-29;
‘‘Novanglus,” in C. F. Ad am s, ed.. Works, TV, 83—84; Laslett, ed., Locke: Two
Treatises, 433; Cato’s Letters, II, 69; Hoadly, Original and Institution of
Civil Government, 284 (numbered 84), 326 (numbered 126), 356 (num¬
bered 156). ^
23 Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 170; Zubly,
Law of Liberty, 32; Essay upon Government, 73, 77—78, 84.
24 [Hicks], The Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power, 29; Essay upon
Government, 12-14; see also. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I, 6-7, 114; de
Lolme, The Constitution of England, 33; Cato’s Letters, III, 164.
ssLaslett, ed., Locke: Two Treatises, 371, 376-377, 378; Cato’s Letters, II,
254, 259; III, 45.
134 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
depended on the character of the laws which were made. The
more supple the law was in confronting new situations, the more
agile it was in nipping tyranny in the bud, the more effective a
barrier it would provide against the potential encroachments of
power.
But the possibility still existed that no matter how good the
laws were the magistrates would nonetheless overstep them.
Against this contingency the colonists invoked a sanction short
of revolution which was at the same time calm, gentle, and
forceful. This was the power of the purse. Errant rulers could be
starved into compliance with the law by the withholding of sup¬
plies. 26
If the people were to be secure from oppression, it seemed
necessary that they have a role in the making of laws and levying
of taxes. Their role could be either active or passive. They could
actively enter into the formation of statutes by framing and
enacting them, or they could passively give their consent to what
the magistrates proposed. However, both alternatives were open
to objection. If the people had the power merely to accept or reject
what questions were proposed to them, history demonstrated that
in their naturally disconnected state they would prove an easy
prey for ambitious rulers, who could divide, deceive, and trick
them with impunity into assenting to whatever the magistrate
desired. But on the other hand allowing subjects an active voice
in policy was liable to all the objections which had been raised
about their potential instability and incompetence. 27
Many observers in the eighteenth century felt that the British
constitution had resolved this dilemma through the institution
of representation. 28 Similarly, contemporary colonial thinkers
“James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legis-
lattve Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774), 13—14;
Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 224—226, 234;
"To the Inhabitants of Great Britain, Sept. 1774,” in Griffith J. McRee, Life
and Correspondence of James Iredell . . . (New York, 1857—1858), I, 208;
Alden Bradford, ed.. Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, from
1765 to 1775 . . . (Boston, 1818), 327; John Dickinson and Arthur Lee,
The Farmer's and Monitor's Letters to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies
. . . (Williamsburg, 1769), 85; An Historical Essay, 84-85.
“Barnard, A Sermon, 13; Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John
Dickinson, I, 257; Boucher, A View, 100, 313, 379, 391, 393; Sir William
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Philadelphia, 1771-
1772), I, 159; de Lolme, The Constitution of England, 54-55, 204-206.
“"The Earl of Clarendon to William Pym,” in C. F. Adams, ed., Works,
III, 480-481; James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and
Proved . . . (Boston, 1764), 13; Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 10; Essay
upon Government, 19; Cato’s Letters, H, 232; Burgh, Political Disquisitions,
RICHARD BTJEL, JR. 135
hoped, by providing that the power of the people should be exer¬
cised by their representatives, to obviate various objections which
were raised against the people’s active participation in politics
while at the same time providing the people with adequate pro¬
tection against oppression from their rulers.
The concept of representation specifies the existence of a
certain relationship between the representative and the repre¬
sented. This relationship is one of consensus or agreement. 29 In
the modem democratic context we are apt to think of this con¬
sensus in a way which was not necessarily congenial to the
dominant values of eighteenth-century political science. Democ¬
racy means rule by the will of the people, and within a framework
of democratic assumptions the representative must place himself
in agreement with at least a majority of his constituents if he is
to remain a representative. Theoretically, in a democracy agree¬
ment is the result of the representative adjusting himself to his
constituent’s views rather than the constituent adjusting himself
to his representative’s views. 30
Such democratic notions had shortcomings from the eighteenth-
century point of view. Aside from the practical difficulties the
people would confront in making decisions upon all the contin¬
gencies of government without access to information and without
the leisure to devote their best energies to the problems at hand,
theoretically to make the representative nothing more than the
obedient lackey of his constituents was the height of folly because
it threatened to deprive society of the benefit of its most talented
personnel. In a world of radically unequal political competencies,
where the least competent would obviously compose the majority
of the population, to surrender the power of political decision to
a majority of the people would be to surrender this important
trust to those in society least capable of executing it, if not to
unprincipled demogogues who might control the mob in their
own interests. 31 For eighteenth-century thought, representation
29 Alfred de Grazia, Public and Republic: Political Representation in America
(New York, 1951), 4.
^Elisha P. Douglass, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal
Political Rights and Majority Rule during the American Revolution (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1955), 51, 185; such a definition reflects popular expectations
about the democratic process more than it represents die actual operations
of a democracy.
a On the dangers to be anticipated from demagogues, see Leonard, Massa -
chusettensis, 13 ff.; Eliphalet Williams, The Ruler’s Duty and Honor, in
Serving his Generation . . . (Hartford, 1770), 12—13; Robert Prescott, A
Letter from a Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston
(New York, 1774), 4; Boucher, A View, 221, 228, 313—314, 364, 385, 416,
508, 544; Cato’s Letters, IV, 247—250.
136 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
not only solved the obvious difficulties that prevented a whole
people from assembling in one place and rationally conducting a
debate, 32 it also was an institution which utilized the political
expertise of the realm in the people’s behalf. The representative
was not supposed to be an average man who reflected the defects
as well as the virtues of his constituents, but in theory he was
supposed to be the best man, the wisest and most virtuous. 33
Far from being the humble servant of his constituents, eight¬
eenth-century thinkers tended to regard the representative as a
quasi-magistrate to whose commands constituents owed presump¬
tive obedience. Though rhetorically representation involved a dele¬
gation by the people of their powers to the representatives, once
the representatives had made laws for the people, the people were
expected to obey the decisions of their "delegates.” Right down
until the crisis of independence the New England, clergy proceeded
to preach obedience to one’s political superiors, and representatives
were as much within the category of "political superiors” as were
governors and councilors. 34
Of course, as we have noted, conditions were attached to obedi¬
ence, and the clergy continued, as the imperial crisis deepened,
to confirm to the people their right to judge when the magistrate’s
power was exercised in violation of the constitution and the public
felicity. 35 But the extent of the people’s commission was confined
to granting or withholding obedience. When the clergy finally
urged the people to withdraw their obedience from the royal gov¬
ernment, they were not then told to express their will in politics
or to riot in a state of nature, but to obey the commands of the
^See ante n. 28; Blackstone, Commentaries, I, 159.
^Eliot, A Sermon, 7, 9-12, 16, 39-40; Barnard, A Sermon, 7; White, Civil
Rulers, 23; Tucker, A Sermon, 23; Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recom¬
mended . . . (Hartford, 1775), 12; Benjamin Trumbull, A Discourse, De¬
livered at the Anniversary Meeting of the Freemen of the Town of New-
Haven, April 12, 1773 (New Haven, 1773), 28; Foster, Short essay, 29, 37;
"Letter to John Penn, Jan. 1776,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, IV, 205; An
Historical Essay, 33, 85.
M Eliot, A Sermon, 7, 41, 58; Mayhew, Discourse, 10; White, Civil Rulers,
22, 34; Tucker, A Sermon, 37; Moses Parsons, A Sermon Preached at Cam¬
bridge, before his Excellency Thomas Hutchinson . . . May 27th, 1772 . . .
(Boston, 1772), 43; Haven, A Sermon, 37-39; Hitchcock, A Sermon, May
25th, 1774, 28, 52; Thornton, Pulpit of the American Revolution, 276-277;
Zubly, Law of Liberty, 32; Edward Eells, Christ, the Foundation of the
Salvation of Sinners, and of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government . . . (Hart¬
ford, 1767), 16.
8 s Haven, A Sermon, 40-42; Hitchcock, A Sermon, May 25th, 1774, 12-13,
21 £E.; Turner, A Sermon, 28-29; Whitney, Transgression, 17 if.; Thornton,
Pulpit of the American Revolution, 284—285.
RICHARD BTJEL, JR. I 37
provincial and continental congresses. 36 John Adams proudly
boasted in 1774 that throughout the dispute with the Mother
Country the people of Massachusetts had “arranged themselves
under their house of representatives and council, with as much
order as ever.” 37 For the colonial leadership independence was not
a democratic movement which dissolved all the ligaments of sub¬
ordination in colonial society and ‘liberated” the people. It was
much more the orderly transference of allegiance from one set of
magistrates to a slightly different set who happened to be called
representatives of the people.
If the representative was not the tool of his constituents but the
equivalent of a magistrate or political superior, was the consensus
which all thinkers anticipated between rulers and ruled, between
representative and constituent, to be derived solely from the latter’s
obedience to the former’s commands? Though most colonial think¬
ers rejected such an extreme position, British proponents of par¬
liamentary power in the colonies were forced to rely on a peculiar
notion of virtual representation which implied as much.
Not all British spokesmen rejected the colonists’ contention that
occording to the constitution no subject might be taxed without
his own consent or the consent of his representative. Rather some
claimed that the colonists were in fact “represented,” or what
was more frequently the case, did in fact “consent” to Parliament’s
acts in exactly the same sense that the nonvoting Briton was
virtually represented and consented in Parliament. 38 To this end
British pamphleteers attempted to demonstrate that the nonvoting
Briton and American occupied identical positions relative to par¬
liamentary power. However, any attempt to convince the colonists
that their interests would be considered equally with British in¬
terests in Parliament’s concern for the common good was fore¬
doomed to failure after the passage of the Stamp Act if not by the
^Joko. Lathrop, A Discourse Preached December 15th 1774 . . . (Boston,
1774), 18, 20; Whitney, Transgression, 54; Isaac Story, The Love of Our
Country Recommended and Enforced . . . (Boston, 1774), 19; Samuel Wil¬
liams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country; Delivered on a Day of
Thanksgiving, December 15, 1774 (Salem, 1775), 27-28; Turner, A sermon,
44; Zabdiel Adams, The Grounds of Confidence and Success in War, Rep¬
resented . . . (Boston, 1775), 15-16; see also Burgh, Political Disquisitions,
III, 426.
37 << Novanglus,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, IV, 68.
^Thomas Whately, The regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies,
and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered (London, 1765), 108, 111;
Josiah Tucker, A Letter from a Merchant in London to his Nephew in North
America . . . (London, 1766), 19; An Historical Essay, 196.
138 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
century of commercial regulation which had preceded it. 39 There¬
fore, British writers were forced to draw other parallels between
the disfranchised in the Mother Country and the colonies in their
attempts to prove Americans were in fact virtually represented in
Parliament.
Crucial to British logic in this matter was the reception of the
Navigation Acts in the colonies. If the colonists could not be
taxed by Parliament because they were not represented, neither
could they be bound by any parliamentary laws, for the constitu¬
tion, it was argued, made no distinction between taxation and
legislation. 40 On the other hand, since everyone knew the colonists
had never disputed the binding force of the Navigation Acts, their
reception by the colonists could be taken as presumptive evidence
that Americans were represented in Parliament, because “every
Argument in support of an Exemption from the Superintendance
of the British Parliament in the one Case is equally applicable to
the others.” 41 For the colonists to submit to the Navigation Acts
when they nonetheless considered themselves unrepresented in
Parliament was inconsistent with their current objections to the
constitutionality of taxation without representation, particularly
when they claimed that the trade regulations were “a tax” upon
them.
Even if one refused to admit that the colonial position was in¬
consistent, British writers could still claim that by receiving the
Navigation Acts in the colonies, Americans had virtually consented
to be bound by parliamentary power. For “the reception of any
law draws after It by a chain which cannot be broken, the un¬
welcome necessity of submitting to taxation. . . . We virtually and
implicitly allow the institution of any Government of which we
enjoy the benefit and solicit the protection.” 42
The crux of the British argument supporting parliamentary
power in the colonies remained the same throughout the imperial
“Such attempts were made; see Whately, Regulations Lately Made, passim.
For the colonists’ reactions to such pleas, see “Novanglus,” in C. F. Adams,
ed.. Works, IV, 49; Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of
British America . . . (Williamsburg, 1774), 9-10, 16.
^Whately, Regulations Lately Made, 104--105; Samuel Johnson, Taxation
no Tyranny . . . (London, 1775), 32; A Letter to a Member of Parliament.
Wherein the Power of the British Legislature and the Case of the Colonists,
are Briefly and Impartially Considered (London, 1765), 17—18; The Right of
Parliament Vindicated on the Occasion of the Late Stamp-Act (London,
1766), 8—9; Leonard, Massachusettensis, 78.
^Whately, Regulations Lately Made, 104.
^Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, 33; see also Wiliam Knox, The Contro¬
versy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies Reviewed (London, 1769),
67-69, 90.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 139
crisis. Americans were bound to obey Parliament’s authority for
precisely the same reasons that nonvoting Englishmen were
bound. 43 However, the colonists felt the only real similarity British
writers were able to point to between the virtually represented or
consenting American and Briton which they did not share in com¬
mon with all mankind, 44 was that neither had voted for repre¬
sentatives in Parliament and yet both had obeyed Parliament’s
statutes. 45 For British thinkers, then, the mark of whether or not
one was represented in Parliament lay in whether or not he had
obeyed Parliament’s commands. Such a logic, which had assumed
what it had set out to prove, could only seem plausible to minds
which likewise assumed that the consensus existing between the
representative and the constituent would invariably depend on
the latter’s obedience to the former’s commands. 46
The concept of representation which British pamphleteers had
advanced seemed to provide no security for the subjects against
the oppressions of their representatives, let alone of their other
rulers. If obedience were the central ingredient of representation,
the subject would have no recourse against the magistrate issuing
unlawful commands except the ultimate and unpalatable one of
revolution. If representation was to offer the subject practical
protection against encroaching power some method of reaching
a consensus between the rulers and the ruled had to be devised
which did not demand the total compliance of one party to the
wishes of the other party, but at least struck a balance between
the two.
However, obedience to the commands of a political superior, in
this case one’s representative, might provide some protection to
^Whately, Regulations Lately Made, 112; Soame Jenyns, The Objections
to the Taxation of Our American Colonies, by the Legislature of Great
Britain, Briefly Consider’d 2d ed. (London, 1765), 8-9; An Englishman’s
Answer, to the Address, from the Delegates to the People of Great-Britain,
in a Letter to the Several Colonies . . . (New York, 1775), 8, Tucker, Letter
from a Merchant, 12 ff.
44 James Otis, Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists. In a Letter to a
Noble Lord, 2d ed. (London, 1765), 9.
45 One could say that Americans and nonvoting Britons also shared in the
benefits and protection offered by British power. But so had the Portuguese,
and this had not made them liable to parliamentary taxation; see The Late
Regulations Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of America . . .
(Philadelphia, 1765), in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 82-83;
Jefferson, Summary View, 6-7. The benefits and protection argument ulti¬
mately resolved itself into a disagreement over whether Parliament was in
fact benefiting and protecting the colonies. British spokesmen proposed to
resolve this disagreement by exacting obedience from America.
48 See Remarks on the New Essay of the Pennsylvania Farmer; and on the
Resolves and Instructions Prefixed to that Essay . . . (London, 1775), 60.
140 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the subject against oppression if the interests of the subject and
the representative were so intimately connected if not identical as
to preclude the possibility of the one injuring the other without at
the same time injurying himself. Moreover, if the consensus which
was finally created between the rulers and the ruled proceeded
not from the total compliance of one to the arbitrary commands
of the other, but was rather the product of an organic unity of
interests which would naturally predispose the representative and
constituent to agreement, obedience would be more attractive to
the subject because it would be his interest as well as his duty to
obey. In this sense Americans might be said to consent to laws
and taxes framed by their representatives in the legislature. 47
The basic ingredient of the colonial notion of representation lay
in maintaining just such an organic relationship of interest be¬
tween the representative and the constituent. If such a relation¬
ship could be established, it would afford the subject security
against the arbitrary decrees of his political superiors without at
the same time absolving him from his obligation to obey their
commands. 48 Ideally, it would lead to a situation where no law
or tax could be passed affecting the liberties or property of the
subject which did not directly affect the legislator. Thus every
burden which the representative attempted to lay on his constitu¬
ents would be equally borne by himself. It was to precisely such a
circumstance that John Adams and others referred when they said
a republic was a government of laws and not of men. 49
* 7 See Farmer’s Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 178;
Eliot, A Sermon, 46.
^Ebenezer Devotion, The Examiner Examined . . . (New London, 1766),
16-17; Tucker, A Sermon, 20-21; Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the
Propriety of Imposing Taxes on the British Colonies . . . (New York, 1765),
7; James Cogswell, A Sermon, 37-38; ‘The Earl of Clarendon to William
Pym” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, III, 481-482; see also Trumbull, Discourse,
passim.
4 ®“Novanglus,” and “Thoughts on Government . . . in C. F. Adams, ed.,
Works, IV, 106, 194; Dickinson and Lee, The Farmer’s and Monitor’s Letters,
68; Wilson, Considerations, 7, 18; Jefferson, Summary View, 10; Farmer’s
Letters, in Political Writings of John Dickinson, I, 204; Dulany, Considera¬
tions, 7, 9-10; Otis, Considerations, 4; [John Joachim Zublyl, An Humble
Enquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon
the Parliament of Great-Britain . . . (Charleston?, 1769), 17, 18; Alexander
Hamilton, A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, from the
Calumnies of their Enemies . . . (New York, 1774), 24; Hamilton, The
Farmer Refuted, 10-11, 17, 22; Josiah Quincy, Jr., Observations on the Act
of Parliament Commonly Caled the Boston Port-Bill . . . (Boston, 1774), 30;
Cato’s Letters, II, 232-233; Laslett, ed., Locke: Two Treatises, 347-348; An
Historical Essay, 116; Granville Sharp, A Declaration of the People’s Natural
Right to a Share in the Legislature . . . , 2d ed. (London, 1775), 3—4; An
Argument in Defense of the Exclusive Right Claimed by the Colonies to Tax
Themselves . . . (London, 1774), 80, 81.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 141
Nor was an intimate association of interests between rulers and
ruled valued solely as security against the abuse of power. It was
equally important as a standing incentive to the ruler to promote
actively whatever interests he might share in common with his
constituents. 50 In binding together the interests of rulers and ruled
lay a guarantee of positive advantages to be reaped by all as well
as of protection against unreasonable oppression.
It was the realization that the magistrate’s power enabled him
to pursue interests distinct from those of the community at large
and therefore constituted a temptation to do so, from which the
ordinary subject was immune, that had ultimately shifted the pre¬
sumption of distrust from the subject to the magistrate. What a
free society really needed, then, was some force to oppose the
insidious tendency of power to separate the interests of the rulers
from the ruled and thereby preserve the nation from the tyranny
to which it was perpetually liable, both from the inherently pas¬
sionate nature of man and from the rational calculations of a few
malignant intelligences. It was precisely this power of keeping the
ruler’s interest dependent on the interest of the ruled which the
provincial leadership was willing to bestow on a populace which
they nonetheless considered incompetent to participate directly in
the esoteric decisions of government and which they still regarded
with suspicion as a potential source of disorder within the polity. 51
But in confiding a power of such importance to the people, colonial
thinkers had also to demonstrate that the populace would not
misuse their trust.
The device which permitted the people to accomplish their im¬
portant function was the franchise, the power to choose whom
their magistrates or representatives were to be. Their experience
as colonials of being subject to an external political authority and
of having officials imposed on them from without had taught
Americans to value the privilege of electing rulers from among
themselves. By virtue of the franchise the people were empowered
to choose representatives whose virtues and abilities were known
to them and whose interest was organically related to their own.
“See by implication references above in n. 49, and in addition, Wilson,
Considerations, 15, 17; Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 10; Trumbull, Dis¬
course, 22; The Present State of Liberty in Great Britain and her Colonies
... By an Englishman (London, 1769), 10; Cato’s Letters, II, 322; III, 277;
Laslett, ed., Locke: Two Treatises, 382.
51 “The Earl of Clarendon to William Pym,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works,
III, 480-481; Article Signed “Shlppen” from Boston Gazette, Jan. 30, 1769,
in Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams, I, 305; Trumbull, Discourse, 25,
30—31; Isaac Wilkins, Short Advice to the Counties of New-York (New York,
1774), 13—14; An Historical Essay, 116.
142 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Moreover* the effect of naturally shared interests was reinforced
by the very act of choice which bound the representative by ties
of honor and gratitude to observe and protect the interests of those
who nominated him. While such an identity of interests was main¬
tained the populace could safely be urged to bestow their favor
on the leading men in the community with some security that
their superior abilities would not be turned against the interests of
the people. 52
However, the power the people possessed to nominate rulers
whose interests, at least initially, were intimately related to those
over whom they presided did not by itself provide the populace
with sufficient security against the potential abuse of the rep¬
resentative’s power. Though each representative by himself was
endowed with insufficient power to have any incentive but to
promote those interests he might share in common with his con¬
stituents, even the smallest power possessed for an indefinite
length of time gave the possessor opportunities to study the ends
to which it might be put, ends which the momentary possession
of great power even could not necessarily procure. Prolonged power
gave the representative an opportunity to pool his limited resources
with other representatives in a general conspiracy against the
public. Such a union could not be easily effected in a short time
because of the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting interests and
passions of any large group of men. However, if once chosen a
representative remained in office either permanently or for a long
period of time, not only would he be subject to greater tempta¬
tions to join with his fellow representatives in pursuing interests
distinct from those of their constituents, but prolonged tenure
would give permanent magistrates, who invariably existed in
mixed monarchies, greater incentives as well as opportunities to
corrupt the representatives of the nation away from the people’s
interests. 53
It was against the operation of forces such as these that colonial
“Eliot, A Sermon, 54; White, Civil Rulers, 25; Shiite, A Sermon, 55; Haven,
A Sermon, 45; Tucker, A Sermon, 44; Thornton, Pulpit of the American Rev¬
olution, 301; Wilson, Considerations, 5; Cato's Letters, III, 7, 15 ff.; the New
England clergy placed great emphasis on choosing a ruler with personal
qualifications which would fortify him against file seductive effects of
power; see for example, Bridge, A Sermon, 27; Whitney, Transgression,
30, 58.
“Peter Whitney, American Independence Vindicated . . . (Newbury-Port,
1777), 49; ‘The people the best governors: or a Plan of Government
founded on the just Principles of Natural freedom,” in Frederick Chase, A
History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire,
John K. Lord, ed. I (Cambridge, Mass., 1891), 655-656; Burgh, Political
Disquisitions, I, 82-180 passim, 370; Cato's Letters, II, 233, 239; Algernon
Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Philadelphia, 1805), II, 373-374.
EICHAED BUEL, JE. 143
thinkers invoked an additional power in the people, the power they
had periodically to re-elect their representatives. If the representa¬
tive betrayed his trust and sacrified the public interest to the grati¬
fication of his private appetites, if he disregarded or dissolved the
natural ties of interest, which had initially been an incentive for
him to pursue his constituent’s welfare, by indemnifying himself
from their oppression, the subjects still possessed the power to
return their representatives to the body of the people . 54
The power of the people to deny re-election to erring representa¬
tives not only involved a mortifying disgrace, it also proved to be
a convenient means of subjecting those who were responsible for
oppressive measures to the full force of their handiwork. If the
representatives participated in the making of oppressive laws from
the operation of which they exempted themselves, all immediate
restraints upon their power would be dissolved. Through the
power of re-election the people could bring oppressive laws to bear
upon all by reducing the authors of these laws to the condition of
subjects at the next election. Faced with the sustained threat of
being made to feel the consequences of their own actions, no rep¬
resentative could contemplate the enslavement of his constituents
while the franchise was still effective. An elected ruler had no
immediate, rational alternative but to pursue the interests he
shared in common with his constituents . 55
Thus the power of the people to punish their representatives by
returning them to the body of the people was an essential tech¬
nique in binding the interests of rulers and ruled together. How¬
ever, many colonial thinkers refrained from asserting that a man
could not be represented unless he voted for a representative. They
were careful to distinguish between the franchise as a technique in
achieving the status of being “represented” and the essential at¬
tribute of being represented, namely an identity or intimate con¬
nection of interests. Thus there was no necessary contradiction
between the colonists’ insistence that they could be represented
only by men chosen within the colonies by themselves and their
assertions that the nonvoting Englishman was nonetheless repre¬
sented in Parliament . 56 However, few Americans would have gone
“Wilson, Considerations, 8-9.
“Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, H; Philip S. Foner, ed.. The Complete
Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945), I, 6 ; “Thoughts on Govern¬
ment,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, IV, 197; Laslett, ed., Locke: Two
Treatises, 309; Cato's Letters, II, 233, 239; IV, 83—84; An Historical Essay,
115, 116, 118, 155.
“Devotion, Examiner Examined, 16; Dickinson and Lee, The Farmer's
and Monitor's Letters, 68-69, 83; Oxenbridge Thacher, The Sentiments of a
British American (Boston, 1764), 5; Dulany, Considerations, 6-11; Wilson,
C onsiderations, 15; Considerations upon the Rights of the Colonists to the
144 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to the other extreme and held that when a whole society was de¬
nied the franchise, as indeed the colonists had been so far as
Parliament was concerned, it could still be represented. What was
a technique with respect to individuals was a necessity for any
distinct interests in the community . 57
Instructions tended to be viewed in the same light as the fran¬
chise, as a means to an end but not to be confused with the end
itself. They were not considered as the commands of the people
with which the representative was bound to comply, but as an
aid in preserving a harmony or unity of interests between repre¬
sentative and constituent. If the problem of diverging interests
had never arisen, instructions would have been unnecessary.
Through instructions the people were able to inform their repre¬
sentatives what their sense of the common interest was in extra¬
ordinary circumstances . 58 But the representative relationship did
not confine the channels of communication to one direction only.
Privileges of British Subjects . . . (New York, 1766), 17; The Connecticut
Resolves, Oct. 25, 1765, in Edmund S. Morgan, ed.. Prologue to Revolution:
Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764—1766 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1959), 55; ‘To the Inhabitants,” in McRee, Life and Correspondence
of Iredell, I, 210; see also J. R. Pole, “Representation and Authority in Vir¬
ginia from the Revolution to Reform,” Journal of Southern History, XXIV
(1958), 29.
^“Thoughts on Government,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works, IV, 195; Boston
Evening-Post, June 24, 1765.
®See Dulany, Considerations, I; “Instructions of the town of Boston . . . ,”
in Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams, I, 1-2, 8; Massachusetts Spy
(Worcester), Apr. 8, 1773; see also Douglass, Rebels and Democrats, 85.
Strict instructions were open to many objections which had been fully can¬
vassed in European and American thought; see Charles, baron de Mon¬
tesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, 3d ed. (London, 1758),
I, 220; Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, H, 368 ff.; Four Letters
an Interesting Subjects (Philadelphia, 1776), 23. Only the prospect that a
legislator was capable of sacrificing the interest of his constituents to his
private interest led men to admit the utility of instructions; Dickinson and
Lee, The Farmer's and Monitor's Letters, 75; Stephen Johnson, Some Im¬
portant Observations, Occasioned by, and Adapted to, the Publick Fast . . .
(Newport, 1766), 32. Though the practice of instructing representatives
increased throughout the imperial crisis, it did not reflect an insurgent de¬
mocracy so much as a desire to distribute the burden of onerous responsi¬
bilities and to convince the Mother Country that colonial protests reflected
the sentiments of a united people; see Remarks upon a Message, Sent by the
Upper to the Lower House of Assembly of Maryland, 1762 . . . (n.p., 1763),
46-47; Massachusetts Spy, Mar. 26, 1772; “Pittsfield Addresses the Committee
of the General Court, November 1778,” in Robert J. Taylor, ed., Massachu¬
setts, Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Formation of Its Con¬
stitution 1775-1780 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 101; Douglass, Rebels and
Democrats, 61. Even after independence the language of many instructions
was not that of insolent command but contained such phrases as, “We
therefore entreat you . . see Taylor, ed., Massachusetts, Colony to Com¬
monwealth, 40, 117—118.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 145
The representative was equally at liberty to persuade his constitu¬
ents that their sense of the common interests was wrong, in fact
it was his duty to do so if he really thought the people were misled
in their judgment . 59 If the people finally refused to re-elect a
representative, it was not because he neglected to obey their
specific orders, but because he had betrayed their interest. In a
society of unequal political abilities the representative was still
thought of as a political superior. The mass of the people elected
representatives not to order them around like lackeys to do the
people’s bidding, but to reap benefit from the distinguished abilities
of the few upon which the safety of society might in large measure
depend . 60
What power the people actually possessed over their represen¬
tatives was not easily misused. In the first place the scope of their
power was limited and precisely defined. It was not part of their
commission to dictate terms to their representatives, but only
to apply the brakes when their rulers went off the track. The
object of their power was merely to maintain an identity of inter¬
ests between rulers and ruled, and the means at their disposal to
accomplish this end allowed the people a minimum of discretion.
They could either accept or reject a delegate, and if they rejected
him choose another in his place . 61 As the New England clergy
pointed out, the people had no incentive to betray their limited
trust for the abuse of their powers would bring civil calamities on
them in this world and damnation on them in the next . 62
Thus representation performed a dual function in refining the
people’s power through their representatives. On the one hand it
enabled a diffuse and unorganized people to make common cause
against their oppressors. Through representation their disorderly,
uncohesive power could be focused and brought to bear in effectual
opposition to the potential tyranny of magistrates not elected by
the people. On the other it helped restrain the populace from the
59 See Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, 43, 341; “Resolves of
the Stockbridge Convention, December 15, 1775,” in Taylor, ed., Massachu¬
setts, Colony to Commonwealth, 16-17; Douglass, Rebels and Democrats, 37.
^See Daniel Shute, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company in Boston, New-England, June 1, 1767 . . . (Boston, 1767),
29.
^•‘The Earl of Clarendon to William Pym,” in C. F. Adams, ed.. Works,
III, 481; see also Cato’s Letters, I, 87; II, 130; Essay upon Government, 109;
Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, I, 13 ff.; William Seal Carpenter, Democ¬
racy and Representation (Princeton, 1925), 36.
^Shute, A Sermon, 69; Haven, A Sermon, 23, 54—55; Thornton, Pulpit of
the American Revolution, 186; Tucker, A Sermon, 36, 63; Cogswell, A Ser¬
mon, 9, 24-25; Shute, A Sermon Preached to the Artillery Company, 42.
146 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
extremes which men dreaded from a united people, even when
they acted for legitimate reasons. Here representative devices
served a useful function by compartmentalizing the subjects into
divisions beneath their representatives. The representative rela¬
tionship facilitated communication vertically between subject and
representative but not horizontally between subjects of different
constituencies. Since the constituents’ legitimate powers were con¬
fined to the election of their particular representatives, the only
normal communication they had with their fellow subjects in
the political arena was through the medium of their delegates.
Representative institutions helped to limit and divide the power of
the people as much as they served to restrain the passions of
rulers . 63
Ill
The complex model of assumptions about the people’s power
with which Americans entered the imperial crisis bore little rela¬
tion to American democracy as it is popularly conceived today.
What power the people did possess was not designed to facilitate
the expression of their will in politics but to defend them from
oppression. Nor were such ideas easily abandoned. They lingered
on throughout the period of constitutional formation and even
into the nineteenth century, helping to account for the many
“undemocratic” features of the state constitutions . 64
However, the jarring effect of the Revolutionary experience ad¬
ministered a series of decisive challenges to this web of undemo¬
cratic assumptions which made it impossible to retain the full
integrity of the model after independence. As the logic of events
thrust rebellion upon the colonists, many were forced to revise
their estimate of title people’s competence. Moreover, once British
authority had been removed from the provincial arena, Americans
were explicitly confronted with a problem which before had been
®*See Burgh, Political Disquisitions, I, 14; An Historical Essay, 3-4; de
Lolme, The Constitution of England , 33-34, 157, 203-226, 278. The re¬
straints representation imposed on the populace received little discussion in
colonial literature during the imperial crisis simply because the provincial
leadership was intent upon marshalling a united people to confront British
power. Only loyalist writers emphasized these restraints in an effort to in¬
hibit colonial unity. See Samuel Seabury, An Alarm to the Legislature of the
Province of New-York . . . (New York, 1775), passim.
°*See Douglass, Rebels and Democrats , 68, 70, 198, 211; J. R. Pole, “His¬
torians and the Problem of Early American Democracy,” American Historical
Review, LXV3I (1961-1962), 628, 640-641.
RICHARD BUEL, JR. 147
only implicit, of protecting themselves from each other. The new
danger demanded new solutions which were forever to destroy the
notion of virtual representation. Finally the Revolution brought
new men into politics who had not been thoroughly schooled in
the dissenting tradition. Often these men represented minority
groups struggling for recognition within the state. Because the
elitist orientation of dissenting theory gave scant support to their
aspirations, they turned elsewhere for their ideas.
However, the subversion of dissenting thought was an insidious
rather than a dramatic development. It has been difficult to trace
precisely because it crept upon many Americans unawares. We
today can hardly hope to understand a process which often eluded
our forebears without defining the point of departure from which
it proceeded.
CHALLENGE
FROM
WITHOUT
FROM GRIEVANCES
TO PRINCIPLES
In developing a case against British measures that
they found objectionable between 1764 and 1776, colo¬
nial leaders formulated several precise constitutional
principles upon and around which they built their argu¬
ments. The nature of two of those principles, the process
by which they took shape, their importance in the long
debate with Britain, and the extent of the colonists’
devotion to them are indicated in the following two
pieces. The most important principle developed by the
Americans was that Parliament could not tax them be¬
cause they were not represented in that body, and, as
the first selection shows, colonial leaders enunciated that
belief fully and explicitly in response to the Stamp Act
and consistently held to it in the next decade. A second
principle, one that took shape more slowly, claimed that
Americans were equal to Englishmen and that Ameri¬
cans were, therefore, entitled to the equal enjoyment, in
the colonies, of the same rights and privileges possessed
by Englishmen in the home islands. How a secondary
grievance—the vice-admiralty courts—contributed to the
development of this principle, which found its fullest
expression in the general assertion of equality for all
men in the Declaration of Independence, is discussed in
the second selection.
Edmund s. Morgan (b. 1916) is a member of the
Department of History at Yale University; david s.
love joy (b. 1919) is a member of the Department of
History at the University of Wisconsin.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 151
Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power
1 764-1766
EDMUND S. MORGAN
I 1
The distinction between internal and external taxes, said
Charles Townshend, was "ridiculous in everybody’s opinion except
the Americans 5 .” 2 The House of Commons was disposed to agree.
Members had declared at the time of the Stamp Act that the dis¬
tinction was meaningless. Some thought that the Americans were
fools for espousing such sophistry; others thought that they were
knaves, who would seize any pretext to avoid paying for their own
protection. And knaves the Americans certainly appeared to be
when they objected to the Townshend Duties almost as vehem¬
ently as they had to the Stamp Act. The colonists in fact seemed
to be a ridiculous group of hypocrites, who capered from one pious
notion of their rights to another. Their conduct was shameful and
their efforts to justify it even more so. First they quibbled about
external taxes and internal taxes. When this distinction failed
them, they talked about taxes for regulating trade as against taxes
for revenue. Before long they were denying that Parliament had
any authority to tax them, and finally they concluded that they
were simply not subject to Parliament at all. The frivolous way in
which they skipped from one of these views to the next was suffi¬
cient evidence that they had no real devotion to any principle
expect that of keeping their pockets full . 3
Reprinted with permission from The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., V, 3 (July, 1948), 311-341. Copyright © 1948 by Edmund S. Morgan.
1 This paper, in a shortened version, was read at a meeting of the Amer¬
ican Historical Association at Cleveland on December 28, 1947. I wish to
express my t hanks to the members of the Association who offered comments
at that time and to the members of my graduate seminar at Brown Uni¬
versity, who criticized the paper at an earlier reading. I also wish to thank
Mr. Bernhard Knollenberg, who read the manuscript and made several
valuable suggestions. m .
Quoted in J. C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston,
1936), 115. „
3 See William Knox, The Controversy between Great-Bntain and Her
Colonies Reviewed. (London, 1769), 34-35: “When the repeal of die stamp-
act was their object, a distinction was set up between internal and external
taxes; they pretended not to dispute the right of parliament to impose
external taxes, or port duties, upon the Colonies, whatever were the pur-
I 5 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The modem historian, who has thrown off the mantle of pa¬
triotism and Whigism for the more sober garments of impartiality,
as tended to accept the Tory analysis of American resistance to
taxation. He does not always cast doubt on the sincerity of the
successive theories of American constitutional rights, but he agrees
with Charles Townshend that it was the Americans who distin¬
guished between internal and external taxes, that they abandoned
this distinction for another, which likewise proved untenable
and so on until they reached the Declaration of Independence!
Thus in the book which examines the American theories most
closely, Doctor Randolph G. Adams’ Political Ideas of the American
Revolution * the American advance toward independence is broken
down into three stages:
In the first, the colonies admitted the right of Parliament to levy
customs dufaes (external taxes), but denied the right of Parliament
to levy excise taxes (internal taxes) upon them. In the second, the
colonies conceded the right of Parliament to regulate the trade of the
Umpire, and hence exercise a legislative authority over the unrepre¬
sented colonies, but denied the right of Parliament to levy taxes of
any land whatever, internal or external. In the third stage of the con¬
troversy, the colonies admitted the right of Parliament to act as a
quasi-imperial superintending power over them and over all the do¬
minions, but denied that Parliament had any legislative authority over
tne colonies as a general proposition, on the ground that the colonies
were not represented in Parliaments
, 1^,^* * W0 stages of American Revolutionary thinking, as
defined by Doctor Adams, have received less attention and are
consequently less well understood than the last stage. My purpose
is to examine the colonial ideas of P arliamentary power in the
period covered by Doctor Adams’ first stage, the period of the
Stamp Act crisis.
It will be remembered that the Stamp Act was under discussion
in the colonies from the spring of 1764 to the spring of 1766.
Ae S rmtht a be^ en hU“wi ayinS v em on ’ or iowever Productive of revenue
waiving fo^thV P arbament „ seem ed to adopt the distinction, and
taS certlte du«ef o? 6 exe * clse ° f lts ri gbt to impose internal taxes,
^New York, 1939 (second edition).
,r *7 69, . For yiews by other historians, see C. P. Nettels The Root*
of AyneTiccin C zvilizaticm (New York 1940') R 34 _cotr. p r n i
Declaration of Independence (New York, 1942, 1945) 80-134* H^I^Eckerf
rode. The Revolution in Virginia (Boston and New York 1916) 28
EDMUND S. MORGAN 153
Although it was in force for less than four months before its repeal
in February, 1766, the colonists had begun to consider it as soon
as they received news of the resolution passed by Parliament on
March 10, 1764, the resolution which declared, "That, towards
furthur defraying the said Expences, it may be proper to charge
certain Stamp Duties in the said Colonies and Plantations/’ 6 The
resolution was one of a series which George Grenville had intro¬
duced as the basis of his budget for the ensuing year. The others
furnished the substance of the Revenue Act of 1764, the so-called
Sugar Act, which became a law two months later. But the resolu¬
tion for a stamp tax was phrased so as to indicate that no action
would be taken on it until the next session, though its ultimate
passage was almost a certainty. 7 The colonists were thus pre¬
sented with two measures which threatened their prosperity and
which consequently obliged them to think about the relation which
they bore to the body which threatened them. They had to con¬
sider the Sugar Act, in which Parliament made use of trade regu¬
lations to raise money and which in itself would have been suffi¬
cient to set discerning minds at work on the question of Parlia¬
mentary taxation. At the same time they had to consider the
Stamp Act, an act which would directly affect almost every person
in the colonies. Of the two, the Stamp Act appeared to most colo¬
nists to be the more dangerous, but in formulating their ideas of
Parliamentary power they could not afford to neglect either meas¬
ure; they had to decide in what way their rights were affected both
by the internal taxes of the Stamp Act and by the external taxes
of the Sugar Act.
Under the pressure of these two acts colonial ideas reached a
remarkable maturity during the period under discussion. In some
regions and among some persons the theory of complete colonial
autonomy was enunciated. For example a meeting of citizens at
New London, Connecticut, on December 10, 1765, adopted resolu¬
tions which rehearsed the principles of government by consent,
specified that the Stamp Act was a violation of those principles,
and finally declared, "That it is the Duty of every Person in the
Colonies to oppose by every lawful Means, the Execution of those
journals of the House of Commons , XXIX, 935.
T Grenville warned the colonial agents that he would bring in a bill for a
stamp tax at the next session of Parliament. See the letter from Jasper
Mauduit to Massachusetts, May 26, 1764 (Massachusetts Archives, XXII,
375); the letter from Charles Garth to South Carolina, June 5, 1764, English
Historical Review, LIV, 646-648; and the account by William Knox, agen
for Georgia, in The Claim of the Colonies to an Exemption from Interna
Taxes Imposed by Authority of Parliament Examined (London, 1765), 31—35.
154 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Acts imposed on them,—and if they can in no other way be
relieved to reassume their natural Rights, and the Authority the
Laws of Nature and of God have vested them with.” 8 If there was
any confusion in the minds of the colonists as to how to go about
reassuming natural rights, newspaper writers were ready with
detailed discussions of the technique of revolution. 9 Short of this,
other writers expounded the theory which later found more classic
expression in the writings of John Adams and James Wilson, the
theory that is assumed in the Declaration of Independence, that
the colonies owe allegiance only to the king and are not bound in
any way by acts of Parliament. 10
But in the effort to arrive at what may be called the official
colonial position during this period, one cannot rely on news¬
papers and pamphlets nor on the resolutions adopted by informal
gatherings of small groups, for these may represent the views of
factions or the idiosyncracies of a single man. Fortunately it is
not necessary to depend upon such partial statements, for in every
colony except Georgia and North Carolina the formally elected
representatives of the people produced some official statement of
belief. Five of the colonies which later revolted drew up statements
in 1764 while the Stamp Act was pending; nine colonies, including
all of the first five, did the same in 1765 after the Act was passed;
and in the same year at the Stamp Act Congress, nine colonies
combined in a declaration which was formally approved by a
tenth. These statements, in the form of resolutions, petitions,
memorials, and remonstrances, are the safest index of colonial
opinion about Parliamentary power. They were carefully phrased
by the regularly elected representatives of the voting population
and adopted, in many cases unanimously, after deliberation and
debate.
In these formal statements it is scarcely possible to discern a
trace of the ideas which the Americans are supposed to have
adopted during the period under discussion. Almost universally
the documents deny the authority of Parliament to tax the colonies
at all. Nowhere is there a clear admission of the right of Parlia¬
ment to levy external taxes rather than internal, and only in three
8 Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser , December 16, 1765.
9 See, for example, .Boston Gazette , December 2, 1765.
10 Maryland Gazette , May 30, 1765; Providence Gazette , May 11, 1765;
Boston Gazette , February 24, March 3, March 17, 1766. Governor Bernard
reported to the Lords of Trade, November 30, 1765, that the Massachusetts
politicians were claiming that the colonies “have no Superiors upon Earth
but the King, and him only in the Person of the Governor, or according
to the terms of the Charter.” Bernard Papers, IV, 203, Harvard College
Library.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 155
cases does such a right seem to be implied. In at least one of these
three, the implication which may be suggested by a partial reading
is denied by a full consideration of the document and the cir¬
cumstances under which it was produced.
II
As might be expected, the statements drawn up in 1764 while
the Stamp Act was pending were generally not as explicit as those
prepared a year later, when the Act had been passed and the
colonists had had more time to think over its implications. The
clearest of the early statements was that made by the New York
Assembly in three petitions, to the King, the Lords, and the Com¬
mons, on October 18, 1764. These petitions, in objecting to both
the Sugar Act and the proposed Stamp Act, claimed that the
colonists should be exempt "from the Burthen of all Taxes not
granted by themselves.” Far from singling out internal taxes, the
New York Assembly stated pointedly:
. . . since all Impositions, whether they be internal Taxes, or Duties
paid, for what we consume, equally diminish the Estates upon which
they axe charged; what avails it to any People, by which of them they
are impoverished? . . . the whole wealth of a country may be as effec¬
tually drawn off, by the Exaction of Duties, as by any other Tax upon
their Estates.
In accordance with this principle New York admitted the authority
of Parliament to regulate the trade of the empire for the good of
the mother country, but insisted that
... a Freedom to drive all Kinds of Traffick in a Subordination to,
and not inconsistent with, the British Trade; and an Exemption from
all Duties in such a Course of Commerce, is humbly claimed by the
Colonies, as the most essential of all the Rights to which they are
intitled, as Colonists from, and connected, in the common Bond of
Liberty, with the uninslaved Sons of Great Britain. 11
The statement made by Virginia in 1764 was almost as plain
as that of New York. The Virginia Council and House of Burgesses
in a petition to the King, a memorial to the House of Lords, and
a remonstrance to the Commons, clai m ed an exemption from all
Parliamentary taxation. To the King they asserted their "Right of
being governed by such laws, respecting their internal Polity and
^Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the
Colony of New York. Began the 8th Day of November , 1743; and Ended the
23d of December, 1765 (New York, 1766), IT, 769—779.
156 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Taxation, 12 as are derived from their own Consent”; to the Lords
they stated their right as British subjects to be exempt from all
taxes, “but as are laid on them by their own Consent, or by those
who are legally appointed to represent them”; to the Commons
they remonstrated “that laws imposing taxes on the people ought
not to be made without the consent of representatives chosen by
themselves,” and added that they could not discern “by what Dis¬
tinction they can be deprived of that sacred birthright and most
valuable inheritance, by their Fellow Subjects, nor with what
Propriety they can be taxed or affected in their estates by the
Parliament, wherein they are not and indeed cannot, constitu¬
tionally be represented.” 13
Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts took a less pre¬
cise view of their rights in 1764 than did New York and Virginia,
although Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least, cleared up the
uncertainty of their position in the following year. In Rhode
Island the General Assembly deputed Governor Stephen Hopkins
to write a statement of the colony’s rights and in addition sent a
petition to the King, dated November 29, 1764. Both Governor
Hopkins’ pamphlet and the petition ignored the constitutional
question raised by the Sugar Act, the question of external taxes;
they argued against the act simply as a trade regulation which
would have ruinous economic consequences. Since none of the
colonies at this time denied Parliament’s right to regulate colonial
trade, Rhode Island, in considering the Sugar Act simply as such
a regulation, made no attempt to deny Parliament’s right to enact
it. Against the proposed Stamp Act Hopkins and the Assembly
did raise the question of right. This proposal, if carried into execu¬
tion, would be “a manifest violation of their just and long enjoyed
rights. For it must be confessed by all men, that they who are
taxed at pleasure by others, cannot possibly have any property,
can have nothing to be called their own; they who have no prop¬
erty can have no freedom, but are indeed reduced to the most
abject slavery.” The petition to the King recited the same objec¬
tions and concluded with a request
that our trade may be restored to its former condition, and no further
limited, restrained and burdened, than becomes necessary for the gen¬
eral good of all your Majesty's subjects; that the courts of vice admi-
^or the question whether or not the adjective “internal” modifies “taxa¬
tion” as well as “polity” see the discussion below of the same phrase in
the Virginia Resolves of 1765.
13 Journals of the Mouse of Burgesses of Virginia 1761-1765 (Richmond,
1907), liv-lvii.
EDMUND S. MOEGAN 157
ralty may not be vested with more extensive powers in the colonies
than are given them by law in Great Britain; that the colonists may
not be taxed but by the consent of their own representatives, as Your
Majesty's other free subjects are. 14
Thus Rhode Island sidestepped the question of external taxes
by ignoring the declared intent of the Sugar Act to raise a revenue.
She took a stand upon constitutional grounds only against the pro¬
posed Stamp Act, only, in other words, against internal taxes. Yet
she did not quite admit Parliament's right to levy external taxes,
because she considered the Sugar Act, erroneously to be sure, as
a regulation of trade and not as a tax. Her position on external
taxes was ambiguous: she didn't say yes and she didn't say no.
Connecticut in 1764 was guilty of the same ambiguity. Con¬
necticut's statement took the form of a pamphlet drawn up by a
George Wyllys and Jared Ingersoll, deputed by the General As¬
sembly, "to collect and set in the most advantageous light all such
arguments and objections as may justly and reasonably [be] ad¬
vanced against creating and collecting a revenue in America, more
particularly in this Colony, and especially against effecting the
same by Stamp Duties &c." 15 This committee, of which Governor
Fitch was the working member, produced a pamphlet entitled
Reasons why the British Colonies in America should not be charged
with Internal Taxes, by Authority of Parliament. 18 The pamphlet
came as close as any American statement to admitting the right
of Parliament to levy external taxes. Like the Rhode Island state¬
ment, it confined its constitutional objections to internal taxes and
failed to consider the problem, raised by the Sugar Act, of whether
Parliament could make use of trade regulations as a source of
revenue. Instead, it assumed that Parliament would act for the
good of the whole in its regulation of trade. "If Restrictions on
Navigation, Commerce, or other external Regulations only are
established,'' it said, "the internal Government, Powers of taxing
for its Support, an Exemption from being taxed without Consent,
and other Immunities, which legally belong to the Subjects of
each Colony . . . will be and continue in the Substance of them
whole and entire." 17 This was a rather naive view of the situation
but it did not necessarily commit the colony to a constitutional
acceptance of external taxes.
14 James R. Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and
Providence Plantations (Providence, 1861), VI, 414—427.
15 C. J. Hoadly, ed.. Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford,
1881), XII, 256.
18 New Haven, 1764. Reprinted in Hoadly, XII, 651-671.
™Ibid. 3 661.
158 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The address of Massachusetts to the House of Commons, dated
November 3, 1764, like the pamphlets issued by Rhode Island and
Connecticut in this year, was not entirely clear on the question of
external taxes. Massachusetts affirmed that the American colonists
“have always judged by their representatives both of the way and
manner, in which internal taxes should be raised within their re¬
spective governments, and of the ability of the inhabitants to pay
them.” The address concluded with the request that “the privileges
of the colonies, relative to their internal taxes, which they have so
long enjoyed, may still be continued to them.” 18 By specifying
internal taxes, the address seemed to imply that the inhabitants
of Massachusetts did not object to the idea of an external tax
imposed by Parliament. This implication was fortified by the rest
of the document, which objected to the Sugar Act on economic
rather than constitutional grounds as a measure which would ruin
the trade of the colony.
Before this address is interpreted as an implied assent to ex¬
ternal taxes the circumstances of its origin must be considered.
The General Court adopted the address only because the Council
refused to concur in a much more inclusive assertion of rights,
originally passed by the lower house. In this version the House
affirmed that “we look upon those Duties as a Tax [i.e., the duties
imposed by the Sugar Act], and which we humbly apprehend
ought not to be laid without the Representatives of the People
affected by them.” 19 The abandonment of this earlier version was
regarded in Massachusetts as a victory for the Council under the
leadership of Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, and the House,
even though it acquiesced in the new address, did not consider it
a proper statement of colonial rights. 20 Accordingly, when they
sent it to their agent in London for presentation, they warned him
that it did not represent the views of the House. “The House of
Representatives,” they said
were clearly for making an example and full declaration of the exclu¬
sive Right of the People of the Colonies to tax themselves and that
they ought not to be deprived of a right they had so long enjoyed and
which they held by Birth and by Charter; but they could not prevail
with the Councill, tho they made several Try alls, to be more explicit
than they have been in the Petition sent you. You will therefore collect
“Aiden Bradford, ed., Massachusetts State Papers, Speeches of the Gover¬
nors of Massachusetts from 1765 to 1775, etc . (Boston, 1818), 21-23.
“Massachusetts Archives, XXII, 414.
^See the letters by Governor Bernard, November 17 and 18, 1764, to the
Earl of Halifax, to John Pownall, and to Richard Jackson, relating the suc¬
cess of the Council in toning down the petition. Bernard Papers, II 181-187
189, 260-264.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 1 59
the sentiments of the Representative Body of People rather from what
they have heretofore sent you than from the present Address. 21
What the House of Representatives had heretofore sent the
agent included a long letter instructing him in the doctrine of
natural rights and an explicit statement that any attempt by
Parliament to tax colonial trade would be “contrary to a funda¬
mental. Principall of our constitution vizt. That all Taxes ought to
originate with the people.” 22 The House had also approved and
sent to the agent a pamphlet written by one of their members,
James Otis, entitied The Rights of the British Colonies asserted
and proved. 2 * In this pamphlet Otis had argued against Parlia¬
ment's right to tax the colonies and had stated in the most un¬
equivocal manner that “there is no foundation for the distinction
some make in England, between an internal and an external tax
on the colonies.” 24 It would hardly seem proper, then, to draw
from the Massachusetts Address the inference that the people of
the colonies accepted the right of Parliament to levy external as
opposed to internal taxes.
Ill
At the end of the year 1764, when the five initial colonial state¬
ments were all on the books, the colonial position was still a little
obscure. New York and Virginia had been plain enough, but Rhode
^Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, LXXIV, 170-171.
ztlbid., 39-54, 145-146.
^Boston, 1764. See Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives of
His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England, Begun
and held at Concord, in the county of Middlesex, on Wednesday the Thirtieth
Day of May, Annoque Domini, 1764 (Boston, 1764), 66, 77.
24 P. 42. Strangely enough these were also the private views of Lieutenant-
Governor Hutchinson, who was principally responsible for suppressing the
original address of the House. In a piece which he wrote in June or July,
1764, but never published, he argued against the Stamp Act on precisely
the same line which was later followed by the House. He pointed out that
the Sugar Act had been passed, not for the regulation of trade, but “for
the sake of the money arising from the Duties,” and that the privileges of
the people were no less affected by it than they were by an internal tax.
(Massachusetts Archives, XXVI, 90-96.) Moreover, on Nov. 9, 1764, just after
he had succeeded in getting the Massachusetts Address toned down, Hutchin¬
son wrote to Ebenezer Silfiman in Connecticut, criticizing the Connecticut
pamphlet for neglecting to object against external taxes. He told Silliman,
who was a member of the Connecticut Committee which drew up the pam¬
phlet, that “the fallacy of the argument lies here it is your supposing
duties upon trade to be imposed for the sake of regulating trade, whereas
the Professed design of the duties by the late Act is to raise a revenue.”
(Massachusetts Archives, XXVI, 117-118.) Why Hutchinson should have ob¬
jected to these views when they came from the Massachusetts House of
Representatives is not apparent.
l6° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, while denying Parlia-
ment s right to levy a stamp tax, had evaded the question of ex¬
ternal taxes. By the close of the following year all signs of hesita-
tion had disappeared. The Stamp Act produced an all-but-unani-
mous reaction: Parliament had no right to tax the colonies.
The first declaration of rights to be made after passage of the
Act was the famous set of resolves which Patrick Henry introduced
into the Virginia House of Burgesses on May 30, 1765. As recorded
on the Journals of the House of Burgesses there were four of these
resolves which passed the House. The first two asserted the right
of the inhabitants of Virginia to all the privileges of Englishmen.
The third declared “that the Taxation of the People by themselves,
or by Persons chosen to represent them” was a “distinguishing
Characteristick of British Freedom, without which the ancient
Constitution cannot exist.” The fourth stated that the inhabitants
of Virginia had always enjoyed and had never forfeited or yielded
up “the inestimable Bight of being governed by such Laws, re¬
specting their internal Polity and Taxation, as are derived from
their own Consent.” 25
Henry had proposed three more resolutions which either failed
of passage or later were expunged from the records. The first of
these merely repeated what the others had already implied, namely
that the General Assembly of Virginia, in its representative ca¬
pacity, had “the only exclusive right and power to lay taxes and
imposts upon the inhabitants of this colony.” The second, more
radical, stated “That his Majesty’s liege people, the inhabitants of
this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or
ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever
upon them, other than the laws or ordinances of the General As¬
sembly aforesaid.” The last provided that anyone who denied the
Assembly’s exclusive power of taxation should be considered an
enemy of the colony. 26
**Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia 1761-1765, 360.
^Ibid., Ixvu. When the Resolves were printed in the newspapers, the three
unsuccessful resolves were included along with the others as though they
had been passed. The Resolves, so far as the incomplete newspaper records
enabie us to tell, were first printed in the Newport Mercury on June 24,
1765, and copied in the Boston papers from the version given there. The
text printed in the papers, besides including the three unsuccessful resolves
omitted one of those actually passed (the third) and considerably abridged
the others. The abridgment did not seriously alter the meaning of the re¬
solves, but the wording was sufficiently changed to suggest that the news¬
paper text was obtained from an unofficial source, probably from some
member of the assembly who had been present when the Resolves were
passed. Possibly the source was Henry himself, for the newspaper version
EDMUND S. MORGAN l6l
The Virginia Resolves even without the inclusion of Henry’s
three additional clauses, constituted a clear denial of Parliament’s
right to tax. The only phrase which could be interpreted as dis¬
tinguishing between internal and external taxes was the phrase in
the third resolution “internal polity and taxation.” Here it was
possible to read the adjective “internal” to modify “taxation” as
well as “polity.” That such a reading would have been incorrect is
suggested by the fact that in the version of the Resolves which
was printed in the newspapers this phrase was changed to read
“taxation and internal police.” 27 Furthermore this was also the
wording in a copy of the Resolves endorsed on the back in Patrick
Henry’s handwriting. 28
The Virginia Resolves served as a model for similar declarations
in most of the other colonies. Rhode Island, where the Virginia
Resolves were first published, was the first to copy them. In Sep¬
tember, 1765, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed six
resolutions, three of which were adapted from those passed by
the Virginia House of Burgesses, two from Henry’s unsuccessful
resolutions (which had been printed in the newspapers without
any indication that they had failed to pass), and one original
resolution which, in effect, called upon officers of government to
pay no attention to the Stamp Act. 29 On the question of Parlia¬
mentary authority the Rhode Island statements, being copied from
those of Virginia, were no less definite: the General Assembly of
the colony had always enjoyed control over “taxation and internal
police” and possessed “the only exclusive right to lay taxes and
imposts upon the inhabitants of this colony.” 30 Rhode Island in
fact went farther than the Virginia Burgesses had been willing
to go and farther than any other colony went in the next eight or
nine years, by calling for direct disobedience to Parliament. She
passed the measure which Virginia had rejected and declared that
her inhabitants need not submit to a Parliamentary tax. Yet in
so doing Rhode Island added a qualification which makes her
position on the question of external taxes open to suspicion. In the
fifth Rhode Island resolution it was stated that the inhabitants of
except in its o mis sion of resolution number 3, closely approximates a copy
of the resolves which is endorsed on the back in Henry’s handwriting. See
Journals of the House of Burgesses, frontispiece and Ixv.
27 Newport Mercury, June 24, 1765; Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, July 1,
1765; Boston Gazette, July 1, 1765; Georgia Gazette, September 5, 1765.
^Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1761-1765, frontispiece
and Ixv.
^Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, VI, 451^452.
»°Ibid., 452.
162 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the colony were ‘‘not bound to yield obedience to any law or
ordinance designed to impose any internal taxation whatsoever
upon them, other than the laws or ordinances of the General As¬
sembly, aforesaid.” 31 In Henry’s version the word “internal” had
not occurred. Rhode Island by inserting it implied that her citizens
could disobey an act of Parliament imposing internal taxes but
not one imposing external taxes. It should be noted that this dis¬
tinction did not appear in the assertions of right contained in the
preceding resolutions, where the authority of Parliament to tax the
colony was denied without qualification. It was only in the sum¬
mons to rebellion that the Rhode Island Assembly felt obliged to
draw back a little. Though their caution on this score was bold¬
ness when compared to the stand of the other colonies, which con¬
fined themselves to declarations of right, nevertheless the appear¬
ance of the word “internal” makes one wonder whether there may
not have been a moderate faction in the assembly which would
have allowed Parliament a right over external taxes. If there was
such a faction, it was not able to insert its views into the resolu¬
tions which defined the rights of the colony but only into the one
which proposed open rebellion. Moreover, a few weeks later, on
November 6, 1765, Rhode Island’s popularly-elected governor,
Samuel Ward* wrote to General Conway that the colonists were
°PP resse d> because “duties and taxes” were laid upon them without
their knowledge or consent. 32
If the Rhode Island Resolves of 1765 still left some room for
doubt on the question of external taxes, the same was not true
of the other colonial statements of that year. The Maryland As¬
sembly, on September 28, passed unanimously resolutions denying
Parliament’s right to tax, in which the only use of the word
“internal” was in the familiar phrase ‘Taxes, and internal Polity.” 33
Meanwhile Pennsylvania, on September 21, had drawn up its own
set of Resolves, to much the same effect. The first draught of
these resolves, written by John Dickinson, included one clause
objecting specifically to internal taxes, 34 but in the version finally
adopted by the assembly there was no mention of the word
“internal.” The crucial item read: ‘Resolved therefore, N.C.D.
That the taxation of the people of this province, by any other
persons whatsoever than such their representatives in assembly.
A Ibid.
**Ibid. } 473.
88 Maryland Gazette, October 3, 1765.
^Charles J. Stille, The Life and Times of John Dickinson , 1732-1808
(Philadelphia, 1891), 339-340.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 163
is unconstitutional, and subversive of their most valuable
rights.” 35
Massachusetts, because of the recess of her assembly, did not
take action until October, though the newspapers began to agitate
for a more spirited statement of rights as soon as they received
news of the Virginia Resolves. 36 Accordingly when the assembly
was called together in October, it produced a set of resolutions
which defined the rights of British subjects and concluded, "that
all acts, made by any power whatever, other than the General As¬
sembly of this province, imposing taxes on the inhabitants, are
infringements of our inherent and unalienable rights, as men and
British subjects; and render void the most valuable declarations
of our charter.” 37 The Connecticut Assembly likewise cleared up the
ambiguity of its earlier statement by a set of resolves modeled
partly on those of Virginia and affirming that an act for raising
money in the colonies “by duties or taxes” was beyond the author¬
ity of Parliament. Connecticut, like Maryland and Rhode Island,
included an item copied after the fourth of the Virginia Resolves,
in which once again the questionable phrase was rendered as
“taxing and internal police.” 38
South Carolina, on November 29, 1765, denied Parliament’s
right to tax, in a set of eighteen resolves copied from the declara¬
tions of the Stamp Act Congress 39 (see below). New York could
scarcely state the colonial position more explicitly than she had
done the year before, but nevertheless on December 11, 1765, she
adopted three more petitions to King, Lords, and Commons, re¬
stating the case with the same clarity. 40 New Jersey in the mean¬
time had adopted eleven resolutions copied principally from those
of the Stamp Act Congress, with nothing said about internal
taxes; 41 and New Hampshire, which did not participate in the
*J. Almon, ed., A Collection of interesting, authentic papers, relative to
the dispute between Great Britain and America (London, 1777), 20—21.
^See, for example, the Boston Gazette of July 8, 1765: “The People of
Virginia have spoke very sensibly, and the frozen Politicians of a more
northern Government say they have spoke Treason: Their spirited Resolves
do indeed serve as a perfect Contrast for a certain, tame, pus iD a nim ous,
daub’d, insipid Thing, delicately touch’d up and call’d an Address; which
was lately sent from this Side the Water, to please the Taste of the Tools
of Corruption on the other.” The reference, of course, was to the Massa¬
chusetts Address of 1764.
Bradford, Massachusetts State Papers , 50—51.
38 Hoadly, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 421-425.
39 John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution (Charleston, S. C.,
1821) I 39_41.
^Journals of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the
Colony of New York 1743—1765, II, 795—802.
u New Jersey Archives, First Series (Paterson, 1902), XXTV, 683-684.
164 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Congress, had given formal approval to all the resolutions and
petitions of that body. 42
The Stamp Act Congress had met in New York during October,
attended by delegates from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Con¬
necticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Mary¬
land, and South Carolina. These delegates had produced a set of
resolutions and three petitions, to the King, the Lords, and the
Commons, all denying the authority of Parliament to tax the
colonies. 43 Here as in the other formal colonial statements of this
year there is no distinction made between internal and external
taxes. The Stamp Act Congress has frequently been treated by
historians as a rather conservative body of men, possibly be¬
cause it acknowledged "all due subordination” to Parliament. But
as conservatives at the time recognized, this phrase was an empty
one unless you stated what subordination was due. It is true that
the conservatives, in Massachusetts at leasts had hoped to gain
control of the Stamp Act Congress. 44 They actually succeeded in
securing Timothy Ruggles as one of the Massachusetts delegates,
and Governor Bernard wrote at least one letter to Ruggles before
the convention urging him to secure submission to the Stamp Act
pending its probable repeal. 45 Ruggles remained faithfully con¬
servative, but the true character of the Congress is sufficiently
indicated by the fact that, as a conservative, he refused to sign the
Resolutions it adopted and was later reprimanded for his refusal
by the not-so-conservative Massachusetts House of Representa¬
tives. 46 The Stamp Act Congress, in other words, was no less
“radical” than the colonial assemblies which sent delegates to it.
^^Nathaniel Bouton, ed.. Documents and Records Relating to the Province
of New Hampshire (Nashua, N. H., 1873), VII, 92.
^ezeldah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution (Baltimore, 1822),
157-460.
4 *Govemor Bernard wrote to the Lords of Trade on July 8, 1765, that in
Massachusetts, where the proposal for the congress initiated, “It was im¬
possible to oppose this measure to any good purpose and therefore the
friends of government took the lead in it and have kept it in their hands
in pursuance of which of the Committee appointed by this House to meet
the other Committees at New York on 1st of October next. Two of the three
are fast friends to government prudent and discreet men such as I am
assured will never consent to any undutiful or improper application to the
Government of Great Britain.” (Sparks Manuscripts 43: British Manuscripts,
IV, Harvard College Library).
^Bernard Papers, TV, 72. The letter is dated September 28, 1765.
46 Boston Gazette , Feb. 17, 1766. The membership of the Stamp Act Con¬
gress has been analysed in an unpublished paper by Mr. David S. Love joy,
in which it is indicated that of the twenty-seven members only two are
known to have become Tories at the time of the Revolution.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 165
Though it acknowledged due subordination to Parliament, it de¬
nied with qualification the right of Parliament to tax the colonies.
In sum, during the period of the Stamp Act crisis, fifteen formal
statements of colonial rights had been issued. Of these only the
three early statements by Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massa¬
chusetts could be interpreted as implying an assent to the con¬
stitutionality of external taxes. The statement by Massachusetts
was clearly not representative of official opinion, and both the
Massachusetts and the Connecticut statements were clarified the
following year by resolutions which unequivocally rejected the
authority of Parliament to tax the colonies at all.
IV
The question suggested by all these declarations of right is:
what did the Americans mean when they admitted due subordina¬
tion to Parliament and at the same time denied Parliament’s right
to tax them? What subordination was due? If they did not dis¬
tinguish between internal and external taxes, but denied all
authority to tax, what authority did they leave to Parliament?
The answer is given clearly enough in the documents: the col¬
onists allowed the right of Parliament to legislate for the whole
empire in any way that concerned the common interests of all the
members of the empire (as yet they made no claim that the colo¬
nial assemblies were entirely coordinate with Parliament in legis¬
lative authority), but they denied that Parliament’s legislative
authority extended either to the internal polity of the colonies or
to taxation. Not all the colonies insisted on exclusive control of
internal polity, for Parliament at this time was not attempting to
interfere in this department. The issue of the day was taxation,
and what the colonies insisted on most vigorously was that Parlia¬
ment’s supreme legislative authority did not include the right to
tax. Taxation and legislation, they said, were separate functions
and historically had always been treated as such. Legislation was
a function of sovereignty; and as the sovereign body of the empire.
Parliament had absolute legislative authority. Under this authority
Parliament was entirely justified in regulating the trade and
commerce of the empire. There was, in other words, nothing un¬
constitutional about the Acts of Trade and Navigation. But taxes
were something else. Taxes were the “free gift” of the people who
paid them, and as such could be levied only by a body which
l66 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
represented the people. As far as Great Britain was concerned the
House of Com m ons was a representative body and could there¬
fore tax the people of Great Britain; but since the colonists were
not, and from their local circumstances could not be, represented
in Parliament, they could not be taxed by Parliament. The only
body with a constitutional right to tax them was a colonial as¬
sembly, in which the people upon whom the tax would fall would
be represented. Thus the Connecticut Assembly in October, 1765,
resolved,
That, in the opinion of this House, an act for raising money by
duties or taxes differs from other acts of legislation, in that it is always
considered as a free gift of the people made by their legal and elected
representatives; and that we cannot conceive that the people of Great
Britain, or their representatives, have right to dispose of our property. 47
According to this distinction the power to levy taxes even in
Great Britain was limited to the House of Commons, the represen-
tative part of Parliament. The petition from the General Assembly
of New York to the House of Commons, December 11, 1765, while
expressing “all due submission to the supreme Authority of the
British Legislature,” affirmed
That all parliamentary Aids in Great-Britain, are the free Gifts of
the People by their Representatives, consented to by the Lords, and
accepted by the Crown, and therefore every Act imposing them, essen¬
tially differs from every other Statute, having the Force of a Law in
no other Respect than the Manner thereby prescribed for levying the
Gift.
That agreeable to this Distinction, the House of Commons has al¬
ways contended for and enjoyed the constitutional Right of originating
all Money Bills, as well in Aid of the Crown, as for other Purposes.
That all Supplies to the Crown being in their Nature free Gifts, it
would, as we humbly conceive, be unconstitutional for the People of
Great-Britain, by their Representatives in Parliament, to dispose of the
Property of Millions of his Majesty's Subjects, who are not, and cannot
be there represented. 48
It was this distinction which the members of the Stamp Act
Congress had in mind when they acknowledged “due subordina¬
tion” to Parliament, for they asked in their petition to the House of
Commons,
^Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, XII, 423.
^Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the
Colony of New York 1743-1765, II, 800.
EDMUND S. MORGAN l6j
[whether there be not a material Distinction in Reason and sound
Policy, at least, between the necessary Exercise of Parliamentary Juris¬
diction in general Acts, for the Amendment of the Common Law, and
the Regulation of Trade and Commerce through the whole Empire,
and the Exercise of that Jurisdiction by imposing Taxes on the Col¬
onies. 49
V
Most members of Parliament would have answered this query
with a flat denial that the power of taxation could be distinguished
from that of legislation. Taxation, they would have said, was in¬
separable from sovereignty. But there were some members willing
to speak in favor of the colonial view. In the debate on the
Declaratory Act in the House of Commons the question arose
over a motion made by Colonel Barre to omit from the act the
phrase “in all cases whatsoever.” This motion was intended to
exclude Parliamenfs authority to tax the colonies, and in the
debate which followed, Barre and William Pitt the elder argued
for the motion in much the same terms as were used in the colo¬
nial statements. Visitors were not admitted to Parliament during
this session, so that few accounts of the debate have been pre¬
served, but according to Charles Garth, member of Devizes bor¬
ough, Wiltshire, and agent for several of the southern colonies, the
speakers for Barre’s motion contended: “That the Principles of
Taxation as distinguished from Legislation were as distinct Prin¬
ciples and Powers as any two Propositions under the Sun.” The
speakers cited the precedent of the counties palatine of Chester
and Durham which had been subject to Parliamenfs legislative
authority but had not been taxed until they were represented.
The clergy, it was pointed out, taxed themselves separately but did
not have separate legislative power. Another indication that the
two functions were separate was that taxes were the free gift of
the Commons, and tax bills could not be considered by the Lords
or the King until the Commons had made a grant. Other bills re¬
mained in the Upper House for the King's signature, but tax bills
were sent back to the Commons, whose speaker presented them
to the King as the free gift of the Commons. All this, it was said.
^Proceedings of the Congress at New York (Annapolis, 1766), 23. The
reprint of the proceedings in Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution
is inaccurate at t h is point.
l68 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
showed that Parliament might legislate as the supreme authority
of the realm but that it taxed only in its representative capacity.
Since the colonies were not represented in Parliament, they could
not constitutionally be taxed by Parliament. 50 In the House of
Lords, Lord Camden argued the case to the same effect. 51
In spite of these arguments Parliament decided by an over¬
whelming majority 52 to include the words "in all cases whatso¬
ever” and thereby, as far as Parliament was concerned, it was
concluded that taxation and legislation were not separate func¬
tions and that Parliament’s authority over the colonies included
the right to tax. But strangely enough the Declaratory Act did not
include any explicit statement of the right to tax, so that the
colonists could not have recognized that Parliament was denying
their position. What the act said was that the King in Parliament
had "full power and authority to make laws and statutes of suffi¬
cient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America,
subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” 53
Though the members of Parliament knew that the words "in all
cases whatsoever^ meant in cases of taxation, there is nothing in
the act itself to give the words that meaning. Nor was the am¬
biguity entirely accidental. When the act was being drawn up,
Charles Yorke, the attorney general, suggested that the crucial
phrase should read "as well in cases of Taxation, as in all other
cases whatsoever.” But when he submitted this suggestion to Rock¬
ingham, who was then prime minister, Rockingham thought it
impolitic to make any mention of the word "taxation.” "I think
I may say,” he wrote to Yorke, "that it is our firm Resolution in
the House of Lords—I mean among ourselves—that that word
must be resisted.” 54 Thus the omission of any mention of taxation
was deliberate. By supporting the act as it stood, with the resound¬
ing but ambiguous phrase "in all cases whatsoever,” the Rock¬
ingham government could gain support in Parliament by en-
^Garth’s account is in Maryland Historical Magazine, VI, 287-305. An¬
other account is in American Historical Review, XVII, 565-574.
^Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, 1895), XIV, 267-268.
^Maryland Historical Magazine, VI, 300; Archives of Maryland, XIV, 280;
Sir John Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third
(London, 1927), I, 254.
“Danby Pickering, ed.. The Statutes at Large (Cambridge, England, 1767),
XXVII, 20.
^British Museum Additional Manuscripts 35430, ff. 37-38 (Rockingham’s
letter). The exchange of correspondence between Yorke and Rockingham is
printed, in part in George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Mar¬
quis of Rockingham (London, 1852), I, 285-288. The date of Yorke’s letter
is not given. Rockingham’s letter is dated January 25, 1766.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 169
couraging the members to beat the drum of Parliamentary power
—behind closed doors—without giving offense to the colonies.
The colonies can hardly be blamed then for not getting the
point of the Declaratory Act. They had not generally been in¬
formed of the debate which had taken place over the words "in all
cases whatsoever,” 55 and since the act was accompanied by the
repeal of Parliament's most conspicuous attempt to tax them, they
might very well interpret it as a simple assertion of legislative
authority with no necessary implication of a right to tax. They
knew that the Declaratory Act was a copy of the earlier statute of
6 George I regarding Ireland. And they knew also that in spite of
this statute Ireland had not been taxed by Parliament. The Massa¬
chusetts Assembly even before passage of the Stamp Act had
argued from the example of Ireland that the colonies might be
dependent on England without allowing England a right to tax
them. 56 After passage of the Declaratory Act the Massachusetts
agent in London, Richard Jackson, encouraged Massachusetts to
believe that the same reasoning was still valid, for he wrote to
Governor Bernard that the act would probably affect the colonies
as little "as the Power we claim in Ireland, the manner of exer¬
cising which you are acquainted with.” 57 The same view was ex¬
pressed by Daniel Dulany of Maryland in a letter to General Con¬
way. According to Dulany the Declaratory Act could not imply a
power to tax, because if it did, then the act of 6 George I must
give authority to tax Ireland, and such authority had never been
claimed or exercised. 58 Thus the fact, so often remarked by his¬
torians, that the colonists took little notice of the Declaratory Act
does not mean that the colonists were indifferent to the question
of principle. They simply did not recognize the Act as a challenge
to their views. They could acquiesce in it with a clear conscience
and without inconsistency, unaware that their interpretation dif¬
fered radically from that held in Parliament. 59
®So far as I have been able to discover Garth’s account was the only one
sent to the colonies, and it was not published at the time.
“Massachusetts Archives, XXII, 415. The argument is made in the petition
to the King passed by the House of Representatives on October 22, 1764,
and non-concurred by the Council.
™Tbid., f. 458. The letter is dated March 3, 1766.
“Sparks Manuscripts 44, bundle 7, ff. 10—11. The letter is not dated.
“George Grenville wrote that the Americans were justified in rejoicing at
the repeal of the Stamp Act “especially if they understand by it, as they
justly may, notwithstanding the Declaratory Bill passed at the same time,
that they are thereby exempted for ever from being taxed by Great Britain
for the public support even of themselves.” William J. Smith, ed.. The
Grenville Papers (London, 1853), m, 250.
170 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
VI
Unfortunately this misunderstanding on the part of the Amer¬
icans was matched by a similar misunderstanding on the part of
many people in England with regard to the colonial position. We
have seen that the American protests against the Stamp Act did
not distinguish between internal and external taxes but denied
that Parliament had any right to tax the colonies. Yet some
Englishmen, at least, thought that the American protests were
directed only against internal taxes. The American misunder¬
standing of the Declaratory Act is explicable by the vagueness of
the act itself, the absence of any official interpretation of it, and
the fact that the Parliamentary debate on it had been closed to the
public. But the colonial statements had all been communicated
to the British government by the beginning of the year 1766,
before Parliament began to consider repeal of the Stamp Act. Why
then did Englishmen suppose that the Americans distinguished
between internal and external taxes?
Of course not all Englishmen did suppose so; those who took
the trouble to read the colonial statements knew better. But ap¬
parently many Englishmen, including members of Parliament, did
not take that trouble. It should be remembered that the colonial
petitions were never formally considered by Parliament. Those
sent before passage of the Stamp Act were thrown out because
of the procedural rule against receiving petitions on money bills.
Those sent for repeal of the Act were excluded for other pro¬
cedural reasons and because they called the authority of Parlia¬
ment into question. Thus although the contents of the statements
could doubtless have been learned by anyone who wished to dis¬
cover them, they were never given a regular hearing in Parlia¬
ment. 60
In the absence of any direct acquaintance with the colonial
statements the average member of Parliament must have gained
his impressions from one of two sources: either from the multi¬
tude of pamphlets dealing with the Stamp Act or from speeches in
Parliament. It is possible but not probable that the authors of
pamphlets against the Stamp Act were responsible for creating the
impression that the Americans did not object to external taxes.
We have already observed an ambiguity in the two pamphlets by
^Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, XVIII, 332-335; Mary¬
land Historical Magazine, VI, 282-288.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 171
Stephen Hopkins and John Fitch which received the approval of
Rhode Island and Connecticut respectively in 1764. Both these
pamphlets used the phrase "internal taxes” in such a way as to
suggest that external taxes might be constitutionally acceptable,
though neither Hopkins nor Fitch explicitly said as much. Two
other pamphlets, which enjoyed a wide circulation though not a
formal legislative approval, also used the words "internal taxes”
in a way which may have helped to bring about a misunderstand¬
ing of the American position. Richard Bland in An Inquiry into
the Rights of the British Colonies 61 demonstrated that the colonist
could not constitutionally be subjected to an internal tax by act of
Parliament. Anyone reading Bland’s conclusions without reading
the argument leading to them might get the impression that
Bland would have agreed to Parliament’s collection of a revenue
from customs duties levied in the colonies; but Bland’s demon¬
stration of his conclusion showed that Parliament could not con¬
stitutionally charge duties in the colony upon either imports or
exports. In fact, he even argued that the Navigation Acts were
unconstitutional. Bland evidently included in the phrase "internal
taxes” the very duties which other people called "external taxes.”
Another pamphlet which objected specially to internal taxes
was Daniel Dulany’s Considerations on the Propriety of imposing
Taxes in the British Colonies* 2 This probably had a wider circu¬
lation than any other pamphlet against the Stamp Act, and it has
frequendy been cited as the source of the distinction between in¬
ternal and external taxes. Although the greater part of Dulany’s
pamphlet was devoted to general arguments against the constitu¬
tionality of Parliamentary taxation, there were a few paragraphs
in which he implied that internal taxes alone were unconstitu¬
tional. Thus he argued, on page 33, that before the Stamp Act,
Parliament had never "imposed an internal Tax upon the Colonies
for the single Purpose of Revenue .” He went on to deny the con¬
tention, which he attributed to the proponents of the Stamp Act,
"That no Distinction can be supported between one Kind of Tax
and another, an Authority to impose the one extending to the
other.” Contrary to this erroneous view, he said, "It appears to me,
that there is a clear and necessary Distinction between an Act
imposing a Tax for the single Purpose of Revenue, and those Acts
which have been made for the Regulation of Trade, and have
produced some Revenue in Consequence of their Effect and Op-
61 Williamsburg, 1766.
^Annapolis, 1765 (second edition). The succeeding quotations are taken
from pp. 30-35.
172 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
eration as Regulations of Trade” According to this distinction
Parliament had the right to regulate trade by the imposition of
duties, even though those duties should incidentally produce some
revenue. Dulany closed the discussion of this point by affirming:
"a Right to impose an internal Tax on the Colonies without their
consent, for the single Purpose of Revenue, is denied; a Right to
regulate their Trade without their Consent is admitted.”
It will be observed that in the course of this discussion, which
occupied two pages of the pamphlet, Dulany had not made entirely
clear what he regarded as constitutional and what he considered
unconstitutional. He said that internal taxes for the purpose of
revenue were unconstitutional, and he said that duties on
trade for the purpose of regulation were constitutional, even
though an incidental revenue might attend them, but he failed
to say explicitly how he regarded duties on trade for the single
purpose of revenue. He failed, in other words, to say how he
stood on external taxes; in fact he did not even use the words
"external tax” at any point in the pamphlet. His readers would
perhaps have been justified in thinking that Dulany admitted
external taxes as constitutional, since he explicitly objected
only to internal taxes. Yet, unless Dulany was simply confused
about the matter, it would appear that in his use of the phrase
"internal tax” he included all duties levied in the colonies for
the single purpose of revenue. In no other way does Dulany’s
argument make sense, for he contrasted what he called an
internal tax for the single purpose of revenue with duties for
the purpose of regulation from which an incidental revenue
might arise. The context indicates clearly that the point of the
contrast was not the difference between internal taxes as opposed
to duties on trade but the difference between an imposition for
the purpose of regulation and one for the purpose of revenue. Du¬
lany emphasized the contrast by italicising the phrases: single
purpose of revenue, incidental Revenue, and Regulations of Trade.
The whole force of the contrast is lost unless the phrase "internal
tax” is taken to include duties on trade collected in the colonies
for the purpose of revenue. That this was Dulany’s understanding
of the term is further indicated in the two paragraphs which fol¬
low those summarized above. Here Dulany demonstrated that the
duties on trade which had hitherto been collected in the colony
had been levied not for the purpose of revenue but for the purpose
of regulating trade. The argument which he used to carry this
point was drawn from the fact that the customs duties collected
EDMUND S. MORGAN 173
in North America brought only £1,900 a year into the treasury
while they cost £7,600 a year to collect. Dulany had taken these
figures from a pamphlet by Grenville himself. He concluded with
some justice that
[i]t would be ridiculous indeed to suppose that the Parliament would
raise a Revenue by Taxes in the Colonies to defray Part of the national
Expence, the Collection of which Taxes would increase that Expence
to a Sum more than three Times the Amount of the Revenue; but, the
Impositions being considered in their true Light, as Regulations of
Trade, the Expence arising from an Establishment necessary to carry
them into Execution, is so far from being ridiculous, that it may be
wisely incurred.
Thus Dulany demonstrated that Parliament could not levy what
he called an internal tax for the purpose of revenue by showing
that Parliament had never levied an external tax for the purpose
of revenue. The conclusion seems inescapable that he used the
phrase "internal tax” in a loose sense, to cover all taxes collected
in the colonies, whether excise taxes or customs duties levied for
the single purpose of revenue. That this was his meaning is also
suggested by the remainder of the pamphlet, in which he argued
against Parliamentary taxation in general terms, as when he
stated that "the Inhabitants of the Colonies claim an Exemption
from all Taxes not imposed by their own Consent.” (The italics
are Dulany’s.)
Dulany’s pamphlet, though it was widely acclaimed as a defense
of colonial rights, certainly employed a confusing terminology,
and it would not be surprising if Englishmen at the time had
gained the impression that there was some sort of distinction in it
between the constitutionality of internal taxes as opposed to that
of customs duties. Though Dulany never used the phrase "external
tax” and though most of the pamphlet will make sense only if his
use of the phrase "internal tax” is taken to include all taxes col¬
lected in the colonies, yet if American historians have derived the
impression that he distinguished between internal and external
taxes, it is not unreasonable to suppose that contemporary English¬
men received the same impression.
What does seem unlikely, however, is that British statesmen
would have assumed, as American historians frequently seem to
do, that Daniel Dulany was the proper spokesman for all the
colonies. His pamphlet was only one of many, and the others
ranged in attitude from complete submission to the authority of
Parliament (as in Martin Howard’s Letter from a Gentleman at
174 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Halifax, to His friend in Rhode Island 68 *) to complete defiance of
Parliament (as in the Considerations upon the Rights of the Colo¬
nists to the Privileges of British Subjects 64 ). Most of the pamphlets
against the Stamp Act refrained from discussing the question of
constitutional right and argued on the grounds of inexpediency or
equity. 65 Those which concerned themselves with the constitu¬
tional aspects of the question devoted a major part of their at¬
tention to the doctrine of virtual representation. 66 This was an
easy target, and in centering the constitutional controversy upon
it die American protagonists gained a tactical victory; for when
their opponents argued that the Americans might be taxed be¬
cause they were virtually represented, this was tantamount to
admitting that the power to tax depended upon representation.
Daniel Dulany put his finger on the weakness of the ministerial
position when he wrote to General Conway:
If the right to tax and the right to regulate had been imagined by
Mr. Grenville to be inseparable why did he tax his ingenuity to find out
a virtual Representation, why did not some able friend intimate to him
his Hazard on the slippery ground, he chose, when the all powerful
Sovereignty of Parliament might have afforded so safe a footing? 67
In other words Grenville himself, by arguing for virtual represen¬
tation (as he did in The Regulations Lately Made concerning the
Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, considered 68 ), had
“Newport, 1765.
“New York, 1766.
“See for example: John Dickinson’s The Late Regulations Respecting the
British Colonies on the Continent of America Considered (London, 1765);
A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Wherein the Power of the British
Legislature, and the Case of the Colonists, Are Briefly and Impartially
Considered (London, 1765); The True Interest of Great Britain, with Respect
to her American Colonies, Stated and Impartially Considered (London,
1766); The Importance of the Colonies of North America, and the Interest
of Great Britain with Regard to Them, Considered (London, 1766); The
Necessity of Repealing the American Stamp Act Demonstrated (London,
1766); The Late Occurrences in North America, and Policy of Great Britain,
Considered (London, 1766); and Benjamin Franklin’s The General Opposi¬
tion of the Colonies to the Payment of the Stamp Duty; and the Consequence
of Enforcing Obedience by Military Measures; Impartially Considered (Lon¬
don, 1766).
“See for example: Samuel Cooper, The Crisis. Or, a Full Defense of the
Colonies (London, 1766), 3-30; Maurice Moore, The Justice and Policy of
Taxing the American Colonies, in Great Britain, Considered ( Wilmin gton.,
N. C., 1765), 7-14; Richard Bland, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British
Colonies (Williamsburg, 1766), 5—12. Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the
Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (Annapolis, Md., 1765),
5—14.
“Sparks Manuscripts 44, bundle 7, f.10.
“London, 1765.
EDMUND S, MORGAN 175
admitted that taxation was not a function of sovereignty but
rather, as the colonies were contending, the prerogative of a rep¬
resentative body.
There was no reason why the pamphleteers on the American
side should have made a distinction between internal and external
taxes when arguing the case against virtual representation; and
it is not surprising that with the possible exception of those dis¬
cussed above, none of them seems to have employed the distinc¬
tion for purposes of argument. The distinction did appear in some
of the literature in support of the Stamp Act, where it served as
a whipping boy. It was attributed to the Americans and then de¬
molished under the heavy gunfire of constitutional history . 69 It
hardly seems likely that the defenders of the Stamp Act would
have attributed the distinction to the Americans simply in order
to discredit the colonial position. It Is much more likely that they
and the members of Parliament really believed that the colonists
did distinguish between internal and external taxes. The question
remains as to how they gained this impression.
The source from which, in all probability, it was derived was
the speeches made in Parliament by friends of the colonies during
the debates on repeal of the Stamp Act and afterwards, not ex¬
cepting the brilliant interview given at the bar of the House of
Commons by Benjamin Franklin. The member of Parliament who
heard that carefully rehearsed performance (or who read it after¬
wards in print) might very justly have concluded that the Amer¬
icans had no objection to external taxes, for Franklin, the arch-
American, at several points had stated that the Americans objected
only to internal taxes. 70 When a member had pointed out that the
objection to internal taxes could with equal justice be applied to
external taxes, Franklin had replied that the Americans did not
reason in that way at present but that they might learn to do so
from the English. The wit of Franklin's tongue obscured the fact
that he was wrong, but the average member could scarcely have
known that. Laughing at Franklin's clever answers, he would prob¬
ably have forgotten the rather pertinent question put by a member
of the opposition: “Do not the resolutions of the Pennsylvania
Assembly say, all taxes?" This question was evidently asked by
a member who knew something about Pennsylvania's attitude.
«#Sc© The Bight s of Parliament Vindicated, On Occasion of the Late Stamp -
Act In Which is Exposed the Conduct of the American Colonists (London,
1766); An Examination of the Bights of the Colonies upon Principles of
Law (London, 1766). _ „ „ „ „ _ ,
"William Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History of England , from the Earnest
Period to the Year ISOS (London, 1813), XVI, 137—160,
176 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Franklin’s answer to it was not as sprightly as his replies to some
of the other questions. The best he could say was that if the Penn¬
sylvania resolutions said all taxes, they meant only internal taxes.
Actually it would have been impossible to tell from Franklin’s
testimony exactly what he thought the constitutional position
of the Americans to be. At times he seemed to be saying that the
Americans assented to external taxes; at other times he implied
that they consented only to the regulation of trade. The perform¬
ance was a good piece of lobbying for repeal of the Stamp Act,
but it gave no clear indication of the American position and cer¬
tainly could have contributed to the idea that the Americans were
willing to accept external taxes.
The speeches of Franklin’s friend Richard Jackson, member of
Parliament for Weymouth, and agent at various times for Penn¬
sylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, may also have con¬
tributed to a false impression of the colonial position. Jackson be¬
lieved that Parliament had a clear right to tax the colonies by
duties on trade. Since Parliament by its admitted right to regulate
trade could prohibit any branch of colonial trade, he reasoned.
Parliament could also tax any branch of colonial trade. 71 Jackson,
moreover, had searched the precedents thoroughly and found that
Parliament in the past had imposed external taxes on the trade of
Chester and Durham and Wales before those areas were repre¬
sented in Parliament. At the same time Parliament had refrained
from taxing them internally until they were granted representa¬
tion. When Jackson rehearsed these views before Parliament, 72 he
must have been listened to as a man of some authority; for he
had the reputation of being extraordinarily learned, 73 and he was,
besides, the official agent for several colonies. The average mem¬
ber of Parliament could not have known that he had been elected
agent for Massachusetts by the political maneuvers of the royal
governor, 74 nor that the Connecticut Assembly had written him a
letter deploring his insufficient insistence upon colonial rights, 75
nor that he owed his appointment in Pennsylvania to his friend
Benjamin Franklin, who had also misrepresented the colonial
position. 76
"Carl Van Doren, ed.. Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and
Richard Jackson 1753-1785 (Philadelphia, 1947), 123-124, 138-139.
194-196; Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, XVIH,
316; Bradford, Massachusetts State Papers, 72—73 .
®Van Doren, Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and Richard
Jackson, 1-2.
^Bernard Papers, HI, 277-283.
Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society , XVIII, 366-367
Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jack-
son , 87, 100.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 1 77
What must also have impressed the uninformed member was
the famous speech by William Pitt, when the Great Commoner
had come out of his retirement to urge the repeal of the Stamp
Act. On this occasion, Pitt had risen to a statement by George
Grenville in which the latter had complained that he could not
understand the distinction between internal and external taxes.
“If the gentleman does not understand the difference between
internal and external taxes,” said Pitt, “I cannot help it.” 77 Pitt’s
reply, if left there, might have been somewhat misleading. Anyone
who listened to the whole of what he had to say would have known
that Pitt, like the colonists, was distinguishing, not between in¬
ternal and external taxes but between taxation and legislation. In
an earlier speech he had stated that “Taxation is no part of the
governing or legislative power,” 78 and now he went on to argue
that “there is a plain distinction between taxes levied for the pur¬
pose of raising a revenue, and duties imposed for the regulation
of trade, for the accomodation of the subject; although, in the
consequences, some revenue might incidentally arise from the
latter.” 79 Pitt was following the argument of Dulany, whom he
had read and admired; 80 and if historians have misunderstood
Dulany’s argument, it is not unlikely that the members of Parlia¬
ment may have misunderstood Pitt’s. Though there was a manifest
difference between Pitt’s and Dulany’s acceptance of trade regula¬
tions which might incidentally produce a revenue and Jackson’s
and Franklin’s acceptance of external taxes as such, nevertheless
all four men were arguing in behalf of the colonies. The average
member may have lumped them all together and come out with
the simple conclusion that Americans accepted external taxes.
This conclusion would have been strengthened a little later by a
speech of Thomas Pownall. PownaU, speaking with some authority
as the former governor of Massachusetts, said explicitly that the
colonists “never objected to external taxes —to imposts, subsidies
and duties. They know that the express conditions of their settle¬
ments and establishments were, that they should pay these—and
therefore they never have had any disputes with government on
this head—but have always found reason to be satisfied in the
moderation with which government hath exercised this power" 81
71 Parliamentary History, XVI, 105.
™Ibid., 99.
™Ibid., 105.
sow. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle, eds.. The Chatham Correspondence
(London, 1838-1840), HI, 192; Moses C. Tyler, The Literary History of the
American Revolution 1763-1783 (New York, 1941), 111 and n.
®-T he Speech of Th-m-s P-n-U, Esq ... in the H —se of C — m-ns, in favor
of America (Boston, 1769), 12.
I78 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Pownall had apparently never read any of the colonial statements.
Perhaps he derived some of his ideas from his friend Benjamin
Franklin. 82 Certainly his authority to represent the views of the
colonists was long since out of date. But how was the average
member to know that? All the friends of America in Parliament
seemed to be of opinion that the Americans were resigned to
external taxes.
Why the colonial advocates in Parliament should have joined
in conveying so false an impression of the colonial position is not
entirely clear. A number of reasons might be offered why Pownall
or Jackson or Pitt argued as they did: Pownell may have been
misinformed; 83 Jackson may have been speaking for himself rather
than for the colonies; and Pitt was misunderstood. But Franklin’s
testimony is more difficult to explain, for Franklin must have
been better acquainted with the colonial declarations than he ap¬
peared to be. Why should he have contributed to the general mis¬
understanding? Furthermore why should all the proponents of
colonial rights have misrepresented the colonies in the same way?
In the absence of direct information one can only suggest that
political circumstances in 1766 required that every friend of the
colonies in England refrain from urging the extreme claims put
forward by the colonial assemblies and join in representing the
colonies as more moderate than they actually were. The immediate
object in 1766 was the repeal of the Stamp Act, and repeal was
not to be attained by blunt denials of Parliament’s authority.
Though the colonists seemed to be unaware of this fact and con¬
tinued on their intransigent course, their friends in England had
to seek support where they could find it. They found it in the
Rockingham administration, and consequendy when they argued
for repeal of the Stamp Act, they argued in Rockingham’s terms.
Now Rockingham’s terms, to judge from at least one account,
were a recognition of the distinction between internal and ex¬
ternal taxes. According to Charles Garth the administration re-
s^ownall cooperated with Franklin on a scheme for raising money in the
colonies by interest-bearing paper currency. This scheme was proposed by
Franklin as a substitute for the Stamp Tax. For details see V. W. Crane,
“Benjamin Franklin and the Stamp Ac?’ Publications of the Colonial Society
of Massachusetts, XXXII, 56-78. On PownalTs participation, see PownalTs
letter to Hutchinson, Dec. 3, 1765, in Massachusetts Archives, XXV, 113.
^That Pownall was an unreliable source of information is suggested by
the fact that he himself had suggested a stamp tax in his book The Admini¬
stration of the Colonies. Dennys De Berdt later wrote that he was “as
irresolute as the Wind, in one day’s debate a friend to America the next
quite with the Ministry,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachu¬
setts, XIII, 377-378.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 179
fused to hear the petition of the Stamp Act Congress, because it
tended to question not only the Right of Parliament to impose
internal Taxes, but external Duties.” 84 Rockingham, it would ap¬
pear, was prepared to settle the colonial issue by leaving internal
taxes to the colonial assemblies. Though this was not as much as
the colonies demanded, it was more than the rest of Parliament
was willing to give, for most members were as ready to assert
Parliament’s right to levy all taxes as the colonists were to deny
it, 85 Rockingham in fact was unable to repeal the Stamp Act on
the basis of the distinction between internal and external taxes.
Instead he was obliged to agree to the Declaratory Act, though
worded in the ambiguous terms already noticed. 86 Rockingham, it
is plain, needed all the support he could get, for he could not
carry the rest of Parliament even as far as he and his own group
were willing to go. In these circumstances it would have been un¬
diplomatic, not to say reckless, for the friends of the colonies to
embarrass him by insisting on the politically impossible claims of
the colonial declarations. It seems unlikely that there was any
formal agreement between the Rockingham group and the other
colonial protagonists, whereby the latter agreed to soft-pedal the
colonial claims to exclusive powers of taxation, but the pressure
of politics undoubtedly dissuaded the friends of the colonies from
giving publicity to the colonial declarations, and probably led
them to cooperate with Rockingham in adopting a distinction
which the colonists would never have allowed.
One conclusion in any case is clear: it was not the Americans
who drew the line between internal and external taxes. It was
recognized in America at the time by such diverse political per¬
sonalities as James Otis and Thomas Hutchinson that the dis¬
tinction was an English one. Otis, as already noticed, in the
pamphlet approved by the Massachusetts assembly in 1764,
scouted the distinction as one that “some make in England. 87
84 Maryland Historical Magazine, VI, 285.
8S TMs fact was reported to the colonists in several letters. See, for exam¬
ple, that of Jared Ingersoll in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Soci¬
ety, XVIII, 317-326, and that of Richard Jackson in ibid., 349-351.
^Dennys De Berdt wrote to Samuel White at the time of repeal that there
were three parties in Parliament so far as the Stamp Act was concerned,
one for enforcing, one for repeal with a declaration of right, and one for
repeal without a declaration. According to De Berdt the administration
favored the last view but was obliged to take the middle position in order
to gain a majority, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts,
XIII 311—312.
**The Rights of the British Colonies asserted and proved (Boston, 1764),
42.
l8o REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Hutchinson, in the third volume of his history of Massachusetts,
gave credit for it to Pitt. Though it is clear that Pitt did not
originate it, Hutchinson evidently thought that he did and was
equally certain that the Americans did not accept it; for he
averred that in levying the Townshend duties, “government in
England too easily presumed, that Mr. Pitt’s distinction between
internal and external taxes would be favourably received in
America.” 88 There were members of Parliament in England, too,
who realized that the distinction was not an American one, for
in the debates on the Declaratory Act, Hans Stanley, the member
for Southampton, embarrassed the Rockingham administration
by pointing out that "The Americans have not made the futile
Distinction between internal and external taxes,” 89 and Lord
Lyttelton did the same thing in the House of Lords in the debate
on the repeal of the Stamp Act, when he stated that "The Ameri¬
cans themselves make no distinction between external and in¬
ternal taxes.” 90 The colonial agents also realized that the colonists
were talking bigger at home than their friends in England would
admit, and the agents repeatedly requested their constituents to
be less noisy about their rights. The colonists in return instructed
the agents to be more noisy about them. 91
The colonists were bumptious, blunt, and lacking in diplomacy,
but they were not guilty of the constitutional frivolity with which
they have been charged. When they objected to the Townshend
Duties in 1767, they had in no way changed the conception of
Parliamentary power which they avowed at the time of the Stamp
Act*, they still admitted the authority of Parliament to regulate
trade and to legislate in other ways for the whole empire; they
still denied that Parliament had a right to tax them. These views
they continued to affirm until the 1770’s when they advanced
to the more radical position of denying the authority of Parlia¬
ment to legislate as well as to tax. Though this denial was gen¬
erally accompanied by an allowance of Parliamentary legislation
as a matter of convenience, there can be no question that the
later position was constitutionally different from the earlier one.
But that the colonists were guilty of skipping from one constitu-
88 L. S. Mayo, ed.. History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Cam¬
bridge, Mass., 1936), in, 130.
^American Historical Review, XVn, 566.
30 Parliamentary History, XVI, 167.
^Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, XVHI, 349-351, 366-
367; Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, LXXTV, 39-54, 145-
146; Massachusetts Archives, XXH, 361-363; Publications of the Colonial
Society of Massachusetts, XDI, 332-333, 335, 337, 354.
DAVID S. DOVE JOY l8l
tional theory to another, like so many grasshoppers, is a Tory libel
that has too readily been accepted by modem historians. American
Revolutionary thought went through two stages, not three; the
supposed first stage never existed. If anyone took a more ad¬
vanced position because of the passage of the Townshend Duties,
it was not the colonists. They were already there.
“Rights Imply Equality”:
The Case Against Admiralty Jurisdiction
in America, 1764-1 776
DAVID S. LOVE JOY
Equality has become a fundamental principle of American
democracy. Although we are frequently reminded that Americans
fail to practice altogether what they preach, still, the concept
of equality is as much a part of the democratic ideal as manhood
suffrage and public education. But the Spirit of ’76, although
not aristocratic, was not egalitarian either. Despite Thomas Jeffer¬
son’s eloquent declaration that all men are created equal, most
Americans of the Revolutionary generation showed little interest
in the broad aspects of human equality which since that time
have helped to direct the course of American history.
One very good reason why eighteenth-century Americans did
not worry much about equality among themselves was that in
America there were not the glaring inequalities between indi¬
viduals and between groups which obtained in Europe. Colonial
society was less stratified than that across the Atlantic. Since
land was much easier to acquire here than there, economic oppor¬
tunity was greater, and wider distribution of land meant wider
distribution of suffrage. In this sense the American colonies were
generally more democratic by nature both politically and socially
than either England or France or any European nation.
What inequality did exist among people in the colonies, whether
it was political or social, economic or religious, was secondary
Reprinted with permission from The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., XVI, 4 (October, 1959), 459-484.
182 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to another kind of inequality which took the colonists’ attention
in the 1760’s and which became a compelling force driving them
toward revolution in the years following. This was inequality not
among Americans but between Americans and Englishmen as
subjects of the same empire, and when Americans became aware
of it, they were grateful to the English for pointing it out to them.
At the close of the French and Indian War, when Englishmen
discovered that their national debt was about as large in pounds
sterling as the new empire was in acres of American wilderness,
they initiated a new colonial policy which would require Ameri¬
cans to contribute through taxation to the financial responsibili¬
ties of this empire. Englishmen were surprised to learn that several
generations of salutary neglect of the colonists were accompanied
by a striking process of economic and political maturity, changing
obedient children into precocious and fractious adolescents. Am¬
bitious Americans regarded Parliamentary taxation as conduct
becoming a stepmother’s severity rather than parental kindness,
and they stubbornly refused to accept it. In justification they
argued a theory of empire which denied Parliament’s right to
tax them without their consent, and, more important, they main¬
tained that Americans were as good as Englishmen and had
claim to the same kind of treatment from government.
No one saw more clearly than John Adams the distinction
Parliament made between American and British subjects. A few
years before his death he wrote to a friend: "However tedious and
painful it may be for you to read, or me to transcribe any part
of these dull [Parliamentary] statutes, we must endure the task,
or we shall never understand the American Revolution.” 1 At the
age of eighty-three, forty-two years after independence, Adams
still bristled and fumed when he thought of the insulting, the
degrading attitude of superiority which Parliamentary statutes
expressed. What he meant was that the inferior status forced upon
the American colonists was an important cause—maybe to Adams,
an ambitious man, the most important cause—of the Revolution
which, in his mind, was a struggle for equality between American
and Englishman.
I
Although Parliamentary taxation was the most celebrated threat
to colonial rights in the early years of the Revolutionary move-
Mohn Adams to William Tudor, Quincy, Aug. 6, 1818, The Works of John
Adeems, Charles Francis Adams, ed. (Boston, 1850-1856), X, 339.
DAVID S. LOVE JO Y 183
ment, it was not the only threat, despite the fact that it has
received more attention than any other issue by historians since
that time. What historians have failed to emphasize is that the
means of enforcing the new taxes were as much an innovation
in colonial policy and as much a threat to equality of treatment
in the empire as the taxes themselves, and, according to the
colonists, just as unconstitutional. For Parliament directed that
the new tax laws could be enforced in either the regular colony
courts where common-law procedures operated or in the courts
of admiralty which proceeded without juries according to the civil
law.
Admiralty court justice was not new to Americans in 1764, or
to the English for that matter. Since medieval times these courts
in England had functioned according to the law of nations, and
their jurisdiction was limited to disputes occurring on the high
seas and traditionally below the first bridge over navigable rivers.
The common-law courts and common lawyers constantly kept
admiralty jurisdiction in check, and Sir Edward Coke owed some
of his reputation as a defender of the common law to frequent
trimming of admiralty jurisdiction when it exceeded the limits
allowed. Certainly admiralty courts were necessary, and if not
popular, they were tolerated since they disposed of disputes,
particularly prize cases, which could be settled in no other way.
However, Englishmen were jealous of the common law and
successfully protected it from unwarranted encroachment by civil
courts. 2
During most of the seventeenth century the colonial govern¬
ments allowed governors and councils and common-law courts to
hear and determine disputes which in England would have been
tried before admiralty judges. When it became apparent that
Americans were not disposed to enforce the Navigation Acts,
Parliament took strong measures. In shoring up the whole im¬
perial structure in 1696, the legislature directed that certain laws
of trade could be enforced either in the common-law courts at
Westminster or in Ireland or in American courts of admiralty
within the colonies where the offenses occurred. Since permanent
admiralty courts did not actually exist in the colonies, they were
established the next year and judges were appointed. The act of
1696, however, was ambiguously phrased, and it left some doubt
whether Parliament meant all forfeitures and penalties under the
acts of trade, or just those mentioned in the new act itself, were
2 Helen J. Crump, Colonial Admiralty Jurisdiction in the Seventeenth Cen¬
tury (London, 1931), chap. I; Winfred T. Root, The Relations of Pennsyl¬
vania with the British Government, 1696-1765 (New York, 1912), pp. 95-97.
184 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
recoverable in admiralty courts in America. (Probably Parliament
intended the new courts to enforce all the acts of trade since
1660; otherwise there would have been little sense in extending
the jurisdiction to America. In any event. Crown officials came
later to regard these courts as suitable for enforcement of all
Parliamentary acts which regulated trade in the colonies.)
Regardless of which interpretation was correct, the act of 1696
gave a larger jurisdiction to admiralty courts in America than
had ever been given to the same courts in England, thus distin¬
guishing between Americans and Englishmen in matters of jus¬
tice. His Majesty’s courts at Westminster, that is, common-law
courts with juries, enforced the acts of trade in England, while
admiralty courts, which proceeded under the civil law without
juries, could enforce some, if not all, of the same acts in Amer¬
ica. 3
A few people recognized the alarming extension of admiralty
jurisdiction in the colonies and protested against it. Among these
was William Penn who understood the necessity of trade and
commerce for nurturing an infant colony. In 1701 he condemned
the comprehensive powers of the new court in Pennsylvania which,
he said, "swallowed up a great part of the Government here. . . .”
Penn understood, too, that his colonists had not come to America
to be deprived of their rights by an arbitrary court: the determin¬
ing of these causes, he wrote, "without a jury, gives our people
the greatest discontent, looking upon themselves as less free here
than at home, instead of greater privileges, which were prom¬
ised.^
3 7 & 8 Gul. Ill, c. 22, sect. VII, The Statutes at Large . . . , Danby Picker¬
ing, ed. (Cambridge, England, 1762-1866), IX, 432; Crump, Colonial
Admiralty Jurisdiction, pp. 1, 128-132, 148-149, 163-164, and passim; Law¬
rence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws (New York, 1939), chap.
XV; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (New
Haven, 1934—1938), IV, 225—229; see also Andrews* Introducion to Records
of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island, 1716-1752, Dorothy S. Towle,
ed. (Washington, D. C., 1936), pp. 5-13; Edward Channing, History of the
United States (New York, 1905-1925), II, 275-277; Root, The Relations of
Pennsylvania, pp. 95-97.
^ Crump implies that all acts of trade could come under admiralty juris¬
diction in America, while Andrews, although recognizing the momentous
change brought about by the act of 1696, seems to think the jurisdiction of
the courts was somewhat limited. For confusing judicial opinions on this
matter, see Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West
Indies, Jan.-Dee . 1, 1702, Cecil Headlam, ed. (London, 1912), 389, 451
554-555. ’ ’
^William Penn to Robert Harley [c. 1701], The Manuscripts of His Grace
the Duke of Portland, TV, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Fifteenth
Report, Appendix, Part IV (London, 1897), 31.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 185
Despite the ominous powers given to the new courts by the act
of 1696, American merchants and traders were not as badly off
as they imagined. It was not long before the common-law courts
found ways to circumvent the admiralty courts or at least to limit
their effectiveness. The act itself was not as clearly worded as
it might have been—"weakly penned,” as William Penn 5 put it—
and was open to several less rigorous interpretations which the
colonists were quick to exploit. The struggle in England between
common law and admiralty law, which had helped to push Sir
Edward Coke into the limelight in the seventeenth century, was
transferred to the colonies in the eighteenth with some of the
same results. Courts of common law grew bold, often usurping
jurisdiction from admiralty courts by issuing writs of prohibition
against their decrees and even discharging prisoners detained by
them. 6 The people of Massachusetts generally assumed that their
Superior Court exercised locally all the powers of the Court of
King’s Bench in England and on this basis justified the court’s
halting admiralty proceedings when the latter got out of line. 7
Jeremiah Dummer defended this conduct as early as 1721 in his
Defence of the New-England Charters . . . , in which he equated
the Massachusetts court not only with the King’s Bench, but
also with the Courts of Common Pleas and Exchequer in England.
If these English courts had a right to restrain admiralty juris¬
diction, so then did the court in Boston; for, he wrote, if “some
bounds are not set to the Jurisdiction of the Admiralty, beyond
which it shall not pass, it may in Time, like the Element to
which it ought to be confin’d, grow outrageous and overflow the
Banks of all the other Courts of Justice.” The fact that admiralty
judges received only fees and no salaries worried Dummer since
they were "strongly tempted to receive all Business that comes
before them, however improper for their Cognizance.” 8
Rhode Islanders made life miserable for an admiralty judge
appointed there: in 1743, just after his arrival, the legislature
enacted a law regulating his fees and reducing them so low, it
*lhid .
6 Root, The Relations of Pennsylvania, pp. 95-97; Edward Channing, His¬
tory , II, 277—279; Harper, The English Navigation Laws, p. 188.
Thomas Hutc hin son, The History of the Colony and Province of Massa¬
chusetts-Bay, Lawrence Shaw Mayo, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), HI, 65,
116.
8 (London, 1721), pp. 50-52, 58, 60. Dummer also argued that an English¬
man ought not to be deprived of his property by civil law since it is "what
he has not consented to him self, or Ms Representative for him.” Therefore,
admiralty court justice should cover only transactions wMch occur on the
Mgh seas and not triable at common law (p. 51).
l86 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
was said, "that the Judge has not a competent Allowance to sup¬
port the Dignity of the Office.” When the ministry in London
accused the colony of interfering with the execution of the court’s
duties. Governor William Greene reassured the Duke of Newcastle
that the court enjoyed complete independence in Rhode Island.
Surprisingly, in the same letter to His Grace, he admitted that
the former deputy judge was then in jail for not paying his
debts. 9
Just about the time Dummer published his Defence, Parliament
again extended the jurisdiction of the admiralty courts in America,
this time, not just beyond the shore line, to which he believed it
ought to be confined, but beyond even the banks of the rivers
which penetrated the interior. The colonists, it seems, were as
careless at times about Parliament’s laws reserving particular pine
trees for the use of His Majesty as they were about the Navigation
Acts. As a consequence, in 1721 Parliament placed enforcement
of the white-pine laws in the courts of admiralty where suspected
colonists could be tried by a single judge according to the civil
law. 10 The extension of admiralty court jurisdiction to include
cutting the King’s masts does not seem to have caused much
complaint. As with the enforcement of the laws of trade, probably
the common-law courts frequently interfered and thwarted the
efforts of Crown officers and admiralty judges. 11
Had the Molasses Act of 1733 been enforced, doubtless the
American colonists would have added to their complaints about
its prohibitive duties the objection that offenses against the act
in America were triable in either their own courts of record
(common-law courts) or the courts of admiralty. Moreover, the
act made clear to those colonists who read it closely just how
discriminatory Parliament could be. Besides levying duties on
imported goods from the foreign islands, the act prohibited the
importation of these same goods into Ireland except when they
had been “loaden and shipped in Great Britain” in proper vessels.
But Parliament specifically directed that offenses committed
°See letters in Correspondence of the Colonial Governors of Rhode Island,
1723-1775, Gertrude S. Kimball, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1903), II, 242-245,
251.
10 8 Geo. I, c. 12, sect. V, Pickering, The Statutes at Large, XIV, 387.
u TMs was not always the case. In 1770 William Dean and his sons, who
lived in the vicinity of what is now Brattleboro, Vermont, went to jail
rather than pay the £800 sterling the admiralty court at New York de¬
manded for cutting sixteen trees on land near their home. Reports of Cases
in the Vice Admiralty of the 'Province of New York and in the Court of
Admiralty of the State of New York, 1715-1788, Charles M. Hough, ed. (New
Haven, 1925), pp. 227-233.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 187
against this section of the act were triable only in courts of record
at Westminster or Dublin. 12 Since customs officials in America
generally avoided enforcement of the Molasses Act 13 and common-
law courts were already adept at preventing cases from coming
to the admiralty courts, the constitutional issue did not arise.
As long as admiralty courts confined themselves to the con¬
demnation of prizes and problems of salvage, wrecks, and sea¬
men’s wages, Americans willingly admitted their jurisdiction. But
courts of admiralty were charged with enforcing the acts of
trade in America, and when they did so, they were thoroughly
disliked. 14 Despite the fact that the seriousness of the colonists’
complaints varied in direct proportion to the degree the courts
interfered with illegal trade, a constitutional issue was involved.
When courts of admiralty exercised all the powers in America
that the act of 1696 intended, then Americans were distinguished
from their cousins in England and were subject to a different
judicial system—one that deprived them, they said, of trial by
jury. But Americans escaped any serious difficulty over admiralty
jurisdiction until after the French and Indian War when Parlia¬
ment levied taxes on the colonists and used admiralty courts to
see that they were paid.
II
The Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765 inaugurated a
major change in British colonial policy. Never before had Parlia¬
ment directly taxed the American colonists, and their violent
reaction to these taxes set in motion a resistance movement which
in twelve years culminated in independence. Besides levying a
threepence tax on each gallon of molasses imported into the
colonies from the foreign West Indies and imposing duties on
several other imports, the Sugar Act explicitly directed that for¬
feitures and penalties imposed by the act and by any of the
earlier laws of trade were recoverable at the election of the
informer or prosecutor in a court of record or a colonial admiralty
court. Any doubt entertained heretofore, owing to the “obscurity,
if not inconsistency,” 15 of the 1696 act, that admiralty courts
^6 Geo. II, c. 13, Pickering, The Statutes at Large, XVI, 375-376.
w For exceptions, see Andrews, Colonial Period, IV, 242—244; also Andrews's
Introduction to Towle, Records of the Vice-Admiralty Court of Rhode Island,
pp. 53-54.
14 Crump, Colonial Admiralty Jurisdiction, pp. 128, 164.
1K Penn to Harley, The Manuscripts cf the Duke of Portland, XV, 31.
l88 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
could try violations of the Navigation Acts was now laid to rest.
What is more, in order to put admiralty justice clear of the
pressure of colonial common-law courts, the Sugar Act authorized,
and an Order in Council established, a vice-admiralty court for
all America to be located at Halifax, Nova Scotia, with both
appellate and original jurisdiction. 16
A few months after the Sugar Act became effective, Parliament
passed the American Stamp Act which would tax the colonists’
use of paper and exact sterling money from most legal and
business transactions. Penalties and forfeitures under the Stamp
Act were also recoverable in courts of record or courts of admiralty
in America. 17 At the election of informers or prosecutors the whole
British colonial system—Navigation Acts, Sugar Act, and Stamp
Act—now came under admiralty court jurisdiction where judges,
linked to the prerogative, decided issues according to civil law
without benefit of juries.
The documents and pamphlets drafted during the Stamp Act
crisis clearly demonstrate that the extension of admiralty court
jurisdiction was a major grievance. The Stamp Act Congress
listed it prominently in the four documents the members pro¬
duced. 18 Most colonial legislatures coupled it with Parliamentary
taxation in their resolves and complained about the subversion
of the rights of Americans. 19 Daniel Dulany in his famous pamph¬
let declared that the Stamp Act, its power to tax and its substi¬
tution of an "arbitrary Civil Law Court, in the Place of . . . the
Common-Law-Trial by Jury . . .” left Americans without "even the
Shadow of a Privilege.” 20 The sacred right of trial by jury, said
John Dickinson, was violated "by the erection of arbitrary and
unconstitutional jurisdictions.” 21 The Constitutional Courant,
probably the most inflammatory piece of political literature at the
time, likened admiralty courts to the "high commission and star
chamber courts” and warned Americans that, since the Stamp
Act gave these courts "jurisdiction over matters that have no
relation to navigation or sea affairs, they may, with equal pro-
10 4 Geo. II, c. 15, sects. LX, LXI, Pickering, The Statutes at Large, XXVI,
49; Acts of the Privy Council of England , Colonial Series, James Munro, ed.
(London, 1908-12), IV, 663-664.
17 5 Geo. ID, c. 12, sects. LVH, LVHI, Pickering, The Statutes at Large,
XXVI, 202, 203.
“Proceedings of the Congress at New-York (Annapolis, 1766).
10 Prologue to Revolution: Sources . . . on the Stamp Act Crisis, ed. Edmund
S. Morgan (Chapel Hill, 1959), pp. 46-62, passim .
Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies
(North America, 1765), p. 25.
**The Late Regulations respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of
America, Considered . . . (Philadelphia, 1765), p. 35.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 189
priety, have jurisdiction in cases of life and death. This is a
real representation of the slavish state we are' reduced to by the
Stamp Act, if we ever suffer it to take place among us.” 22 Ad¬
miralty courts, said James Otis, “savour more of modem Rome
and the Inquisition, than of the common law of England and the
constitution of Great-Britain.” 23
In 1765 John Adams, who still lived in Braintree, and whose
reputation as a lawyer and patriot was modest, to say the least,
compared with that of James Otis, began a series of attacks upon
admiralty justice which contributed to his growing stature as a
major Revolutionary figure. Adams as much as any colonist hated
the Stamp Act and all Parliamentary statutes which discriminated
against Americans. But, in the instructions he drafted for Brain¬
tree’s representatives, he saved his severest condemnation for
the “alarming extension” of admiralty court powers, which, he
claimed, was the “most grievous innovation of all,” for it violated
the Great Charter itself and shamelessly distinguished between
Americans and English in matters of justice. 24 This was only
the opening gun of Adams’s attack; he later demonstrated even
more forcefully the disgraceful inequalities which Parliament
cavalierly established under courts of admiralty in America.
Granted the colonists objected to Parliamentary taxation for
very human and self-interested reasons. Granted they objected
to admiralty court trials for the same human and selfish reasons
—after all, the chances of losing one’s shirt would be about a
hundred times greater at Halifax or before any admiralty judge
than in a local court before a jury of one’s peers. Granted, then,
the colonists had self-interested motives; their dislike for parting
with their property does not vitiate the constitutional arguments
they brought to bear against the process used to take it way from
them. In the colonists’ eyes, the new use of admiralty justice in
America compounded Parliament’s original error, for these courts
would enforce unconstitutional taxes by unconstitutional means.
Ill
To understand the Tory and English defense of admiralty court
jurisdiction in America is to understand in part the growing
^Reprinted in a paper by Albert Matthews on the snake devices, 1754—1776,
and the Constitutional Courant, 1765, in Colonial Society of Massachusetts,
'Publications, XI (Boston, 1910), 429—430.
&The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764),
p. 28.
24 Adams, Works , III, 466—467.
I0O REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
difference between American and English interpretations of the
empire and the rights of colonists as British subjects. Justification
for admiralty jurisdiction over American trade, said its defenders,
was simply its necessity. Juries “in these causes were not to be
trusted,” said Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts. No
candid man “will take upon him to declare, that at this time an
American jury is impartial and indifferent enough, to determine
equally upon frauds of trade.” 25 Martin Howard, a Newport Tory,
came to the same conclusion, and although he admitted that the
court at Halifax was a “severity in the method of prosecution,”
it was a severity Americans had brought upon themselves. Smug¬
gling was so prevalent, he argued, that the “government is justi¬
fiable in making laws against it, even like those of Draco , which
were written in blood.” 26
In 1776 Thomas Hutchinson achieved the dubious honor of
answering for Englishmen, article by article, the Declaration of
Independence. When he came to the grievance that Americans in
many cases were deprived of trial by jury, he demonstrated the
same blindness to American argument that had afflicted the
ministry for some time. Omitting completely any reference to the
fact that admiralty courts in America could enforce Parliamentary
taxation, he cited only admiralty court jurisdiction over breaches
of the laws of trade and over trespass upon the King's woods as
cases in which trial by jury was denied. In both of these, he
argued, the “necessity of die case justified the departure from the
general rule” 27
A few years later, George Chalmers, a Tory historian in Eng¬
land, referred to the year 1697 as the era of “memorable change
in colonial jurisprudence,” which “superseded in some measure
the trial by jury, that had been found to be inconvenient in pro¬
portion as it was favorable to popular rights.” Chalmers cushioned
this “memorable change,” or so he believed, by informing his
readers that John Locke himself had “expressly advised his sov¬
ereign ‘to setde courts of admiralty under proper officers of his
own appointment, in order to prevent illegal trade in those
*Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America (London, 1774),
pp. 16-17. Governor Bernard's words were echoed in London by defenders
of the Stamp Act. See anon.. The Conduct of the Late Administration Ex¬
amined, 2nd ed. (London, 1767), p. 36.
“A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, to his Friend in Rhode-Island
(Newport, 1765), pp. 17-20.
^Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia; In a
Letter to a Noble Lord, &c. (London, 1776), p. 24, recently reprinted by
the Old South Association, Old South Leaflets, no. 227, Malcolm Freiberg,
ed. (Boston, 1958).
DAVID S. DOVE JOY 191
parts/” 28 Tory argument implied very clearly that Parliament
was justified in violating the rights of its subjects so that the
Navigation Acts might be enforced.
Justification for admiralty court enforcement of Parliamentary
taxation grew in part out of the defense of these courts for the
regulation of trade. Enforcement of the Stamp Act in the ad¬
miralty courts, said its advocates, was really not a "novel measure”
at all, because "a jurisdiction had been assigned to the judges
of the court of admiralty, upon the laws of revenue and trade,
without juries, for near a century past.” 29 This argument goes to
the very bottom of the chasm which divided the colonists and the
Parliament in these years. Unlike Englishmen, Americans did
not speak of trade and revenue in the same breath. They had
always accepted regulation of their trade, and although they
smuggled on occasion, they seldom doubted Parliament’s right to
control their commerce. But the colonists distinguished abso¬
lutely between statutes which regulated their trade and statutes
which taxed their trade and themselves. Members of the Stamp
Act Congress and Daniel Dulany, in 1765, and John Dickinson,
a few years later, made this distinction clear, and most Americans
were disposed to agree with them. 30
Englishmen, on the other hand, thought this distinction absurd,
because to them there was little difference between regulation of
trade and taxation, since both brought in revenue to the Crown.
Navigation Acts since 1660 had regulated the commerce of the
empire, but they had also, when enforced, produced some revenue.
For Americans to argue that regulation was right and taxation
was wrong made no sense to most members of Parliament and
the ministry. According to their argument, Parliament had al¬
ways taxed American trade; and violations of these laws were
^Although written during and just after the Revolution, only a part of
this work was published in London in 1780 and entitled Political Annals
of the Present United Colonies. The complete work was published in two
volumes in Boston in 1845 and called An Introduction to the History of the
Revolt of the American Colonies. See I, Introduction and p. 275.
Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, to which is added,
an Appendix, No. Ill, containing. Considerations on the Points lately brought
into Question as to the Parliament's Right of taxing the Colonies, and of the
Measures necessary to be taken at this Crisis (London, 1766), pp. 43—44
(of Considerations ); anon.. Conduct of the Late Administration, pp. 22-25,
34 _ 37 ; anon.. Correct Copies of the Two Protests against the Bill to Repeal
the American Stamp Act (Paris, 1766), pp. 16-19.
^Proceedings of the Congress at New-York, p. 23; Dulany, Considerations
on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes, p. 34; John Dickinson, Letters from a
Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Phila¬
delphia, 1768), pp. 29-30.
192 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
cognizable in courts of admiralty in America. Most Englishmen
saw no reason, then, why admiralty courts were not competent
to try cases involving further taxation of Americans under the
Sugar and Stamp Acts, particularly since these courts were made
necessary by the reluctance of colonial juries to convict Americans.
One can imagine that this argument made no impression what¬
soever upon colonists who for some time had questioned admiralty
jurisdiction over the trade laws. To extend the jurisdiction of these
courts to enforce direct taxation of Americans was intolerable, not
merely because the taxes were believed unconstitutional but
because the court procedure offended their sense of justice as
British subjects.
Englishmen further argued that an admiralty trial for a viola¬
tion of the Stamp Act in America did not really distinguish
Americans from English subjects with respect to trial by jury. 31
And if the issue were trial by jury alone, the Englishmen had
the better of the argument. Americans, apparently, were unmind¬
ful that Englishmen had paid stamp taxes since 1694. In addi¬
tion, forfeitures and penalties for several violations of the English
acts, specifically for printing or selling pamphlets and newspapers
on unstamped paper, had been cognizable since 1711 before two
or more justices of the peace only, with appeal to a quarter
sessions court, consisting of more justices of the peace, in the
county, riding, or shire where the offenses occurred. 32 Actually
neither subject enjoyed trial by jury when he disobeyed a stamp
act. But the English argument in defense of the American act
on these grounds did not go far enough. It failed to point out
that the Englishman was brought before a court in his own
neighborhood or county where he could count on traditional
common-law procedure, while the American might find his trial
set in some other colony besides his own or even at Halifax, Nova
Scotia, and presided over by a single judge trained in the civil
law.
Had Parliament authorized the enforcement of the Stamp Act
in the colonies by the same means that similar acts were en-
®Anon., Correct Copies of the Two Protests against the Bill, p. 17; anon..
Conduct of the Late Administration, p. 36.
**For the English stamp acts, see in particular 5 & 6 Gul. Ill, c. 21 ; 9
& 10 Gul. in, c. 25; 10 Anne, c. 19, sects. CXIX, CXX, CLXXII; 16 Geo. II,
c. 26, sect. V; Pickering, The Statutes at Large, IX, 306-321, X, 153-167,
XII, 377-378, 388-389, XVHI, 134-135. See also Edward Hughes, ‘The
English Stamp Duties, 1664^1764,” English Historical Review, INI (1941),
244-246, 249, 252, 253; Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes
in England (London, 1884), m, 323—377. Dowell says nothing about en¬
forcement of the stamp acts.
DAVID S. DOVE JOY 1 Q 3
forced in England, the colonists might not have complained as
loudly as they did, for justices of the peace were certainly more
amenable to the will of the people than were admiralty judges
appointed by the Crown. Doubtless members of Parliament were
well aware of this when they made enforcement of the American
act possible in the courts of admiralty. Experience in England
had demonstrated that the stamp acts were not well obeyed
there. 33 But Parliament had never dared to enlarge admiralty
jurisdiction to assure obedience in England. Parliament did dare
to enlarge this jurisdiction in America. This was the distinction:
British subjects were under the common law in England but
would be under civil law in America for violations of stamp
taxes. Although the principle involved, as far as equal treatment
was concerned, was not trial by jury, it was equally fundamental.
Had the colonists answered the argument regarding equal loss
of jury trial, they probably would have exclaimed, and not very
respectfully: "If an Englishman was deprived of trial by jury
for disobeying a stamp act, he ought not to be!”
The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 gave the act’s proponents
an opportunity to portray their enemies as unsympathetic to
American complaints against distant courts and interested judges.
Just as the Sugar Act had authorized an over-all vice-admiralty
court in America, so the Stamp Act under Grenville had em¬
powered the creation of several more of these courts, with both
appellate and original jurisdiction, to be distributed among the
thirteen colonies. Once Parliament had passed the act, the
Treasury recommended to the Privy Council that the court at
Halifax be switched to Boston and two others be established, one
at Philadelphia and one at Charlestown, South Carolina—also
that dignified salaries be settled on the judges to relieve them
of the criticism that poundage and fees tempted them to action. 34
But shortly after they had passed the Stamp Act, George Gren¬
ville and his friends went out of government, giving way to the
Marquis of Rockingham and his people. Secretary Henry S. Con¬
way, whose duty it would have been under Rockingham to act
upon the proposals for new vice-admiralty courts, failed to do so
before Parliament, led by his faction, repealed the Stamp Act,
thus revoking the authorization for additional courts. The question
^Hughes, ‘The English Stamp Duties,” English Historical Review, LVI,
249, 252, 253.
s*5 Geo. Ill, c. 12, sect. LVHI, Pickering, The Statutes at Large, XXVI,
203; Munro, Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial Series, XV, 664; anon..
Correct Covies of the Two Protests against the Bill, pp. 17-18; anon..
Conduct of the Late Administration, pp. 36-37.
194 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of constitutionality, as we have seen, the Stamp Act defenders
brushed off with the argument that admiralty courts had always
enforced acts of trade and revenue in America and that stamp
duties even in England were not enforced by jury trials. Now,
they said, the blame for injustice and inconvenience, in dragging
a colonist to a court far distant from his home where he was
unknown and where the judge was paid in fees, must be laid
at the feet of the administration which repealed the Stamp Act . 35
This was cold comfort for the American colonists. The only
complaint against admiralty jurisdiction which seemed to get a
hearing in England was that the vice-admiralty court at Halifax
was grievous because it was too far removed from the centers
of trade. And, as it turned out, relief from this particular griev¬
ance was frustrated by the repeal of the very act they protested—
an act which taxed Americans without their consent and author¬
ized enforcement of the tax in courts of civil law.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, not because it was un¬
constitutional, as the colonists claimed, but for the sake of ex¬
pediency, since it was economically unwise and, probably more
important, since the colonists generally refused to obey it. Al¬
though the courts of admiralty never got the chance to enforce
the Stamp Act, the possibility had unsettled a good many people.
Moreover, the constitutional issue, according to the colonists,
remained unresolved; if Parliament could levy one tax and place
its enforcement within the jurisdiction of the admiralty courts,
it could levy another and enforce it in the same way. Furthermore,
the Sugar Act remained on the statute books—although the tax
on molasses was reduced to one penny a gallon — 36 and the court
at Halifax was still open for business.
The Stamp Act crisis forced Americans to examine more closely
their status within the empire. Probably very few agreed with
Benjamin Gale of Connecticut that the Stamp Act had ‘laid the
foundation for Americas being an Independant State .” 37 Never¬
theless, the people, said John Adams, "even to the lowest ranks,
have become more attentive to their liberties, more inquisitive
about them, and more determined to defend them, than they
were ever before known or had occasion to be .” 38
In defending these liberties, several Americans concluded that
"Anon., Correct Copies of the Two Protests against the Bill, pp. 16-19;
anon.. Conduct of the Late Administration, pp. 22-25, 37.
386 Goo- HI, c. 52, Pickering, The Statutes at Large , XXVII, 275-276.
’“Extracts from the Itineraries ... of Ezra Stiles, Franklin B. Dexter ed.
(New Haven, 1916), p. 494.
“Adams, Works, II, 154.
DAVID S. LOVEJOY I 95
British subjects were equal in other matters besides the rights to
consent to taxes and to demand the protection of the common
law. The Boston town meeting declared that “Britons have been
as free on one side of the Atlantic as on the other”; when a
people become colonists they are still naturally a part of the
state and “intitled to all the essential rights of the mother coun¬
try .” 39 Rhode Islanders petitioned the King and reminded him
of their “equal freedom” with their fellow subjects in Great Brit¬
ain . 40 Their governor, Stephen Hopkins, besides declaring that
colonists anywhere throughout history had always enjoyed the
same rights as subjects who remained at home, boldly argued that
the separate American colonies and England constituted a com¬
monwealth of nations, each with its own government—the colo¬
nies were subject to the superintendence of Parliament only for
such general matters as the regulation of trade . 41 A pamphleteer
in North Carolina admitted that “the more closely united the
Mother Country and the Colonies are, the happier it will be for
both”; but, he cautioned, “such an union will never take effect,
but upon a foundation of equality .” 42 Richard Bland of Virginia
complained bitterly of Parliamentary acts which put heavier re¬
strictions on American than on English commerce. Such acts, he
declared, “constituted an unnatural Difference between Men under
the same Allegiance, bom equally free, and entitled to the same
civil Rights.” I am speaking of the “Rights of a People,” and
“Rights imply Equality in the Instances to which they belong.
. . .” Colonists, he concluded, “were not sent out to be the Slaves
but to be the Equals of those that remain behind .” 43
The crisis over taxation provoked among a number of Ameri¬
cans the doctrine that British subjects, regardless of where they
lived, ought to be treated as equals. Americans, it seems, were
content to be colonials as long as their status as colonists was in
no way inferior to that of subjects within the realm—an inter¬
pretation of the British Empire which was a slap in the face to
most eighteenth-century Englishmen. If Americans believed this
^“Substance of a Memorial presented the House,” May 1764, bound in
Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, p. 70, John Carter Brown Library, Brown
University.
40 Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, John R. Bartlett, ed. (Providence,
1856-1865), VI, 415.
^The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, 1764), reprinted ibid.,
VI, 424-425.
^Maurice Moore, The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies,
in Great-Britain, Considered (Wilmington, N. C., 1765), p. 15.
43 An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (Williamsburg, 1766),
pp. 23, 27.
196 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
in the 1760’s, and there is certainly evidence that a number of
them did, then Benjamin Gale’s conclusion, although extreme for
the time, was not very far from the truth. An empire in which
all subjects were “bom equally free” and live upon a “foundation
of equality” was no empire at all, as both Englishmen and Ameri¬
cans came to see in the next few years.
IV
Just how hollow a victory the Americans won in the repeal of
the Stamp Act became clear the next year when Charles Town-
shend persuaded Parliament to levy more taxes on the colonists,
this time on certain goods imported from England: glass, lead,
paper, paint, and tea. Again, suits for recovery of forfeitures and
penalties inflicted by the new taxes were cognizable in the courts
of admiralty. The Townshend Acts set up elaborate machinery
for rigorous enforcement not merely of import taxes but of all
the laws of trade as well. An American Board of Customs was
created with headquarters in Boston where it could keep an eye
on colonial ships and merchants and where its members soon
earned unenviable reputations as racketeers and pirates. 44
Americans learned, too, that what Parliament had intended to
do under the Stamp Act, but did not do because of the act’s
sudden repeal, it accomplished under the Townshend Acts. The
new legislation authorized several vice-admiralty courts distribu-
ted in America, and the Privy Council eventually established four
one at Halifax (recommissioning the court already there) and
one each at Boston, Philadelphia, and Charlestown, South
Carolina giving them original and appellate jurisdiction over
the areas under their control. To meet the complaint that the
judges profits increased in proportion to the number of condem¬
nations they made, salaries of £600 per annum were fixed upon
them, and they were forbidden to accept fees or gratuities of
any kind. 45 The establishment of more courts in America with
better opportunities for their use by customs collectors only an¬
tagonized the colonists and provoked louder complaints. The
constitutional issues were the same; and as far as convenience
was concerned, a Connecticut merchant, instead of following his
Stahdee°nt L^'rge, XXVTI ,^^2^447^449, XXVm ’ 70-71^ PlCkenas ’ The
7ct7, ‘ * »• «■» <*■■*
DAVID S. DOVE JOY IQJ
vessel to Halifax to see it condemned, might now have to go only
as far as Boston, or a Virginian to Philadelphia, for the same
privilege.
The choice of judges for these new courts did not make the
pill any easier for the colonists to swallow. Jonathan Sewall
accepted a commission for the court at Halifax without relinquish¬
ing his post as King’s attorney in Massachusetts, while the Boston
judgeship went to Robert Auchmuty, already well established as
judge of the Bay Colony’s admiralty court. 46 The two remaining
positions at Philadelphia and Charlestown were given to former
Stamp Masters Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut and Augustus
Johnston of Rhode Island, obviously in compensation for their
trying experiences during the Stamp Act riots when both were
hanged in effigy, threatened in person, and forced to resign. 47
V
Before the government had quite established the new vice¬
admiralty courts, the commissioners of customs and the local
admiralty courts combined in the late 1760’s to give American
merchants and traders the roughest handling they had ever re¬
ceived from the customs people. By a calculated system alter¬
nating between deliberate negligence and utmost severity, the
Crown officials inaugurated what Oliver M. Dickerson has called
an “era of customs racketeering” which pushed many a neutral
merchant into the patriot camp.
Customs collectors could seize vessels and libel cargoes, but
it took admiralty courts to condemn them and legalize the divi¬
sion of spoils. The two most notorious instances occurred in
Charlestown and Boston in 1767 and 1768; both demonstrated
the obvious intent of customs officials to destroy influential mer¬
chants, and both provoked violent attacks upon the admiralty
courts, increasing the hatred already felt for them. The first
involved Henry Laurens, wealthy merchant and planter and
popular figure in South Carolina. Within twelve months the
customs collector and his deputy at Charlestown seized on frivo¬
lous charges three of Laurens’s vessels and a fourth in which he
*®Josiah Quincy, Jr., Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Superior
Court of Judicature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay , 1761—1772 (Bos¬
ton, 1865), pp. 300, 311—312n.
Lawrence H. Gipson, Jared Ingersoll (New Haven, 1920), pp. 294—297,
ZS9n; Newport [Rhode Island] Mercury , Dec. 5, 1768, May 15, 1769.
198 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
had part interest, immediately taking the cases to the colony's
admiralty court for trial and condemnation. The cases were
heard before Egerton Leigh who was not only judge of the
admiralty court, but also attorney general of the colony, surveyor-
general of His Majesty's customs, a member of the colony's
council appointed by the King, and a prominent practicing lawyer.
Each case, whether he won it or not, cost Laurens a good deal
of money in costs of court and fees for the judge. The last case,
involving the packet Ann caused so much adverse publicity for
Judge Leigh and his court that he was obliged to dismiss the
charge—not, however, before Laurens had exposed and declared
to the world by newspaper articles, letters, and pamphlets the
infamous conduct of both customs people and the court. 48
Laurens disclosed what he called the "amazing Accession of
Jurisdiction given to Courts of Admiralty" in America. British
subjects, he declared, quoting William Blacks tone, had always
asserted, “That it is the most transcendent Privilege which any
Subject can enjoy or wish for, that he cannot be affected either
in Ms Property, his Liberty, or his Person, but by the unanimous
Consent of twelve of his Neighbours and Equals.’" Like other
ambitious Americans who had accumulated property and repu¬
tation and who intended to go right on accumulating both, Laurens
was struck by the discriminatory treatment admiralty courts gave
the colonists. How were causes relating to the revenue decided
in England, or even in Ireland, he asked. Are they tried before
the Admi r al? Laurens answered with a thumping NO! America
was the “only Place where Cognizance of such Causes is given
to the Admiralty." Why are Americans so “particularised, to be
disfranchised and stript of so invaluable a Privilege as the Trial
by Jury?” Are the liberties of an American less dear or of smaller
consequence “than those of any other Subject of the British
Empire?" Laurens presumed they were not. 49
Judge Leigh fought back with a dreary discourse of over 150
pages, scrupulously avoiding any discussion of the constitutional
issues at stake. He focused his attack on Laurens, who, he said,
thirsted “after the phantom Popularity," and whose libelous writ¬
ings demonstrated the “evil workings of a cruel and malignant
heart.” Besides defending himself at the other’s expense, Leigh
^Oliver, M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution
(PhnadelpMa, 1951), pp. 224-231; Laurens, Extracts from the Proceedings
of the High Court of Vice-Admiralty, in Charlestown, South-Carolina . . .
(Charlestown, 1769).
4®«A Few General Observations on American Custom-House Officers, and
S? 113 ?. U aPP** 11 ^ to Extracts from the Proceedings of
the High Court of Vice-Admiralty, p. 3.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 199
held up to ridicule Laurens’s "unlettered judgment” in the law
and declared him clearly out of his depth in an inquiry completely
foreign to the "whole study and labour of his life.” 50
Henry Laurens answered shortly, defending his character, his
conduct, and his recent publication of the admiralty court pro¬
ceedings which had followed the seizure of his vessels. He repro¬
duced a good deal of the correspondence involved in the contro¬
versy which, along with the court proceedings, was particularly
damaging to the reputation of Judge Leigh. Again he drove home
for all the world to see the major grievance he and other Ameri¬
cans suffered: "the Disadvantages to which a British Subject,
whose Property, perhaps his ALL, and his Reputation into the
Bargain, is exposed by a Trial in an American Court of Vice-
Admiralty before a Volunteer sole Judge.” Any doubt in Laurens’s
mind up to this time as to where his allegiance belonged was
soundly resolved. 51
Laurens and his friends received some satisfaction from their
long drawn-out struggle: both the collector and his deputy were
replaced, and the government in England gave Egerton Leigh his
choice of keeping the judgeship or his post as the King’s attorney.
He chose to remain as attorney general probably because of the
larger fees, although Laurens doubtless would have testified that
the fees as judge were nothing to sneeze at since for the past
year or so Laurens himself had paid most of them out of his
own pocket. Laurens received a measure of satisfaction he may
not have counted on, for he managed, during the course of one
of the trials, after a “by your leave, in the phrase and manner of
a London porter,” to pull the collector by the nose. 52
Henry Laurens’s counterpart in Massachusetts was the wealthy
merchant and recognized patriot, John Hancock, who had never
got along well with customs people and disliked in particular the
commissioners who descended on Boston in 1768. Hancock’s dis¬
like was bountifully returned, and at the same time the customs
officials in Charlestown were ganging up on Laurens, the com¬
missioners, the collectors, and Governor Bernard himself launched
an attack on Hancock unprecedented for its illegality and greed.
In June of 1768 the customs officials seized Hancock’s sloop
“The Man Unmasked: or, the World Undeceived, in the Author of a Late
Pamphlet, Intitled, “Extracts from the Proceedings . . ” (Charlestown, 1769),
pp. 13, 22, 26, 40, and passim.
a An Appendix to the Extracts from the Proceedings of the High Court of
Vice-Admiralty . . . containing Strictures upon, and proper Answers to . . .
The Man Unmask’d (Charlestown, 1769), p. 24 and passim.
“Dickerson, The Navigation Acts, p. 231; Leigh, The Man Unmasked, pp.
35-36, 100-101, 102-103; Laurens, An Appendix to the Extracts, p. 11.
200 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Liberty for loading whale oil and tax without first giving bond
that the cargo’s destination was within the limits of the laws of
trade. Despite the fact that Hancock and all other Boston traders,
with full knowledge of the customs people, had always loaded first
and given bond later before clearance, the letter of the law in
this instance was enforced, and Hancock stood by helpless while
the King’s men sailed the sloop out into the harbor and anchored
it under the covering guns of a man-of-war. He was not entirely
alone, however; a number of sympathizers met and rioted through¬
out Boston in reaction to what they believed to be outright plunder.
During the summer months the admiralty court met, condemned,
and confiscated both vessel and cargo and divided the proceeds
according to law: one-third to the colony, one-third to Governor
Bernard, and one-third to the informers, in this case, the customs
officials.
Although Hancock lost both vessel and cargo, the action did
not impair his fortune, his prestige, or his influence in Massa¬
chusetts. The customs officials tried again and in the fall of
1768 brought suit in the admiralty court, this time against Han¬
cock himself, for smuggling wine in the Liberty several months
earlier. His vessel, it seems, had arrived at Boston in May of
that year with a cargo from the islands; the tax was paid on the
declared amount of wine and the cargo unloaded. But in the
fall the customs commissioners, partly on the evidence of a per¬
jured witness, claimed that Hancock had actually unloaded in
May large quantities of undeclared wine valued at £3,000 and
therefore, according to the Sugar Act, was liable to a penalty of
treble the costs of the cargo. Moreover, the law said, anyone
who aided in unloading contraband was also guilty of the offense,
and the customs people claimed that five of Hancock’s friends
had assisted him. The government filed suit against six Boston
merchants for £9,000 each or a total of over £50,000 sterling
for allegedly smuggling one hundred pipes of wine into the port.
The admiralty court accepted the case against Hancock in Per¬
sonam, issued a warrant for his arrest, and demanded and got
bail of £3,000, an exorbitant amount for a case of this kind.
Obviously the commissioners of customs and Governor Bernard,
each of whom would benefit handsomely from a conviction, had
plotted and planned at some length for Hancock’s demise. 53
“For information about the events leading to Hancock’s trial, I have relied
upon Dickerson, The Navigation Acts , pp. 231-250; Quincy, Reports of
Cases , pp. 456-457, 459; George G. Wolkins, “The Seizure of John Hancock’s
Sloop Liberty Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, LV (1921-
1922), 260-261.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 2,01
When Hancock appeared in court before Judge Auchmuty in
November 1768, he happily brought John Adams with him as
counsel. The Braintree lawyer, now moved to Boston, was by
this time of wider reputation as both lawyer and patriot than
when he began his siege against admiralty jurisdiction at the
time of the Stamp Act. Not content merely to defend Hancock
against a smuggling charge, Adams, like James Otis seven
years earlier in the famous writs of assistance case, transcended
the immediate issue and defined fundamental principles which
were to become stock in trade in the Revolutionary movement.
But while Otis attacked the writs and general warrants in 1761
as contrary to natural law and the natural rights of Americans,
Adams stuck to the rights of subjects under the British con¬
stitution. In what was doubtless for Adams his best opportunity
to date, he attacked with considerable eloquence the legislative
authority of Parliament and in particular, admiralty court juris¬
diction in America.
Adams, who has left his defense laboriously transcribed in his
“Admiralty Notebook,” was much more interested in the validity
of the Sugar Act itself than in the specific charge of its violation
(although he defied the court to prove that Hancock was aware
that any undeclared wine had been removed from the Liberty ).
Three years earlier the colonists, almost to a man, had denied
Parliament’s right to tax them without their consent. Since that
time Parliament had done nothing to convince them they were
wrong. In fact, between 1765 and 1774 Americans enlarged then-
attack from taxes without consent to laws without consent, and
by the latter date they denied Parliament any authority in Amer¬
ica. John Adams contributed generously to this shift in American
opinion, and in Hancock’s trial before the court of admiralty, he
harangued at length about subjection to laws which the colonists
had not approved. In words which must have maddened and at
the same time amused the ministry and Parliament when they
read them, he boldly remarked of the statute in question: “My
Clyant Mr Hancock never consented to it.” 54
Not only, argued Adams, was the Sugar Act passed without the
colonists’ approval; not only were the penalties inflicted by it—
that is, treble the value of the smuggled cargo—out of all pro¬
portion to the severity of the crime; but, added Adams, violations
of this act, these penalties and forfeitures are “to be heard and
w For information about Hancock’s trial, I have relied upon John Adams,
“Admiralty Notebook,” in Adams Family Papers, Miscellany, Legal Papers
(microfilm, reel 184, Brown University Library); Quincy, Reports of Cases ,
pp. 457, 459.
202 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tryd.—how? Not by a Jury, not by the Law of the Land” but
by the civil law before a single judge, contrary to the will of the
ancient barons who, in similar circumstances, had answered in
one voice: "We will not that the laws of England be changed,
which of old have been used and approved.” The barons of modern
times, Adams went on, were quite willing that the laws of Eng¬
land should be changed, at least as far as America was concerned,
and, more important, "in the most tender Point, the most funda¬
mental Principle.” But the crowning insult to Americans was that
this statute, on the same page that it deprived Americans of trial
by jury and the law of the land, directed that the penalties and
forfeitures incurred under the act in Great Britain be prosecuted,
sued for, and recovered in His Majesty’s courts of record which
proceeded under the common law.
John Adams’s next remarks demand a full hearing, because
they go to the core of a fundamental cause of the American
Revolution, a cause which has been only partly appreciated and
not specifically demonstrated. Here, said Adams, "is the Contrast
that stares us in the Face!”
The Parliament in one Clause guarding the People of the Realm,
and securing to them the Benefit of a Tryal by the Law of the Land,
and by the next Clause, depriving all Americans of that Priviledge.—
What shall we say to this Distinction? Is there not in this Clause, a
Brand of Infamy, of Degradation, and Disgrace, fixed upon every
American? Is he not degraded below the Rank of an Englishman: Is it
not directly, a Repeal of Magna Charta, as far as America is con¬
cerned . . . [and here Adams quoted in Latin: No freeman shall be
taken or imprisoned or disseised of his freehold or liberties or free
customs or outlawed or exiled or any otherwise destroyed, nor will we
pass upon him nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers
or the law of the land.] This 29. Chap, of Magna Charta has for many
Centuries been esteemed by Englishmen, as one of the noblest Monu¬
ments one of the firmest Bulwarks of their Liberties. . . . The Stat 4
G. 3 [Sugar Act] takes from Mr Hancock this precious Tryal Per
Legem Terra, and gives it to a single Judge. However respectable the
Judge may be, it is however an Hardship and Severity, which distin-
guishs my Clyent from the rest of Englishmen. . . 55
After challenging the authority of Parliament and the consti¬
tutionality of the court, Adams proceeded to tear to shreds the
court’s use of evidence and examination of witnesses, claiming
that the court had so mixed up the rules of civil and common
'“John Adams, “Admiralty Notebook”
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 203
law, using favorable parts of each for the benefit of the govern¬
ment alone, that no one could tell under which system of law
his client was being unfairly tried. This last impressed the judge,
or so it seemed, and after an interlocutory decree in March 1769,
pronouncing that the Crown’s method of examination was im¬
proper, the attorney general stopped proceedings and withdrew
the case. 56
It would be easy to conclude that Hancock owed the happy
outcome of the trial to Adams alone, but there was more involved
here than Adams’s eloquent persuasiveness. Several things oc¬
curred in the spring of 1769 which convinced the customs people
that they would be better off out of the business. Governor
Bernard, it was learned, was soon to be recalled; the government
in England became suspicious of the motives of the commis¬
sioners and curious as to just what the customs people had done
with all the revenue. Meanwhile, Auchmuty and the attorney
general were promoted to vice-admiralty judgeships in Boston
and Halifax with fixed salaries of £600 apiece, a fact which may
have reduced the necessity of plundering Hancock. In any event
the case was dropped. 57
Unlike James Otis’s attack against writs of assistance in 1761,
which received little publicity then or later, 58 Adams’s speech
before the admiralty court did not long lie hidden from public
view. During and after the extended trial, from November 1768
well into the spring of the next year, the colonial presses, adept
at the use of propaganda, were fed a running account of what
occurred behind the closed doors of the court. 59 Not two months
after his final appearance before the court, Adams lifted from
the "Admiralty Notebook” whole sections of his argument against
admiralty courts and incorporated them into Boston’s instructions
m lbid.
87 Dickerson, The Navigation Acts, pp. 245-246; Boston under Military
Rule, 1768—1769, as revealed in A Journal of the Times, Oliver M. Dickerson
ed., (Boston, 1936), pp. 83-84.
^For a discussion of Otis’s speech, see Oliver M. Dickerson, “Writs of
Assistance as a Cause of the Revolution,” in The Era of the American
Revolution, Richard B. Morris ed., (New York, 1939), pp. 40, 42—43.
^During the winter and spring, 1768—1769, The New-York Journal printed,
and several other colonial newspapers reprinted in whole or part, what
was called a “Journal of the Times,” describing contemporary events in
Boston including Hancock’s trial. These articles, some of which appeared
later in English journals, have been collected and published in Dickerson,
Boston under Military Rule. For an account of Hancock’s trial, see pp. 18-
84, passim. For further discussion of the “Journal,” see Arthur M. Schles-
inger. Prelude to Independence, the Newspaper War on Britain, 1764—1776
(New York, 1958), pp. 100-103, 312-313.
204 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to its representatives in the General Court where they would
receive wide currency and again prompt printing in the news¬
papers. 60 The next year the Massachusetts House of Representa¬
tives digested Adams’s argument including the quotation from
Magna Charta—this time in English—and sent it to Benjamin
Franklin, its agent in London. 61 The fate which befell the speech
of James Otis was not repeated in the case of John Adams. The
vigorous attack on admiralty justice and on the authority of
Parliament and the clear denunciation of Parliamentary statutes,
which, he said, fixed upon every American a “Brand of Infamy,
of Degredation, and Disgrace,” received wide publicity at home
and abroad through his own efforts.
VI
Adams, Hancock, Laurens, and other Americans were not to
be degraded below the rank of Englishmen. A government in
London which by Parliamentary statute relegated Americans to
an inferior position within the empire was not long to be toler¬
ated. Inferiority was galling to an ambitious people, and inferi¬
ority was never more explicitly demonstrated than in the exten¬
sion of admiralty court jurisdiction in America. Enactments,
which deprived colonists of trial by jury and the law of the
land, denied them that equality of treatment they insisted was
their birthright as British subjects. John Adams sooner than
most Americans recognized that mere denial of Parliament’s
power to tax Americans was a feeble defense of American rights;
for it was the legislative authority of Parliament over America
which was doing the damage, and one had to go no further
than the extension of admiralty court jurisdiction to see just
how much damage this authority had done. The concerted attack
on Hancock, Laurens, and their property was sufficient warning
of what might follow. And despite the slight easing of tension
owing to the repeal of most of the Townshend taxes, the colonists
did not let up in their complaints against the extending to “so
^May 15, 1769, Adams, Works , III, 507-510. Half of the content of these
instructions is devoted to admiralty court justice as a major grievance. On
June 29, 1769, The Nezv-York Journal, Supplement , printed an attack on
admiralty court jurisdiction using many of Adams's own words and phrases.
See Dickerson, Boston under Military Rule, pp. 97, n. 2, and 98—99.
“Nov. 6, 1770, Papers Relating to Public Events in Massachusetts Pre¬
ceding the American Revolution , HI, Massachusetts Papers, Seventy Six
Society (Philadelphia, 1856), p. 174.
DAVID S. LOVE JOY 205
enormous a degree” the powers of these courts. Sam Adams in¬
cluded the grievance In his “List of Infringements and Violations
of Rights” which he persuaded the Boston town meeting—John
Hancock, moderator—to adopt in the fall of 1772. 62 And wily
old Benjamin Franklin the next year vexed the English in London
with the biting explanation that depriving Americans of trial by
jury and subjecting them to arbitrary judges—the ‘lowest char¬
acters in the country”—was one of the Rules by which a Great
Empire may be Reduced to a Small One. 63
In five short years after Hancock’s trial, a majority of Ameri¬
cans had caught up with John Adams; a series of events, begin¬
ning with the Boston Massacre and ending with the Coercive Acts
of 1774, convinced Americans that the sooner they got out from
under Parliament the better. They sent to the Continental Con¬
gress in September of that year delegates who fashioned a theory
of empire which admitted allegiance to the King but denied
Parliament any authority whatever in America except when the
colonists consented. The Resolves of the Congress were a declara¬
tion of equality, announcing that Americans and Englishmen
were equally subject to the same King and to their local legisla¬
tures, Parliament in England and the colonial assemblies in
America. The Congress also declared, as had most protests since
1764, that the American colonies were “entitled to the common
law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable
privilege of being tried by their peers. . . ” Any statutes denying
these rights—and the Congress suggested several—Parliament
must immediately repeal. 64
The only trouble with the concept of empire which Americans
formulated in the fall of 1774 was that its acceptance was limited
to one side of the Atlantic. King, Parliament, and ministry scoffed
at such ideas and stirred their troops in America to see to it that
the colonists remained subject to the authority of Parliament.
Within a year hostilities commenced.
Unable to establish themselves equal to the English within the
empire, Americans in July 1776 cast off and declared themselves
equal to the English as members of the human race; for, said
Jefferson, all men are created equal. The appeal to the law of
nature above the constitution was not so much a stroke of genius
62 Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764-1788,
Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (Oxford, 1929), p. 94.
63 The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Albert H. Smyth, ed. (New York,
1905-1907), VI, 132.
^Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Worthington C. Ford,
ed. (Washington, D. C., 1904-1937), I, 69.
206 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
in 1776 as it was a stark necessity. The home government’s re¬
fusal to accept the colonists’ terms and the outbreak of fighting
dissolved the hope of Americans’ being equal on any other
grounds. Despite the fact that Jefferson’s magnificent declaration
of human equality has come to mean many things to many men
since 1776, it had only a particular meaning at the time it was
written. Americans were not yet interested in the rights of all
men. They had been interested in the rights of British subjects
and particularly American subjects, and these rights, they said,
implied equality. When the government in London repeatedly
offended their sense of equality, as it did when meddling with
the common law and trial by jury, the Americans called a halt
and set up for themselves. John Adams knew what he was talking
about when he advised his friend to read the statutes if he wanted
to understand the American Revolution.
FROM ANXIETIES
TO DISAFFECTION
Behind the concrete issues and explicit arguments of
the American protest against British policies between
1763 and 1776 lay a cluster of deepseated anxieties that
were brought to the surface of colonial consciousness by
those policies. The nature of those anxieties, and the
ways in which they determined the American response
to the developing Revolutionary situation, are discussed
in the first selection in this chapter. This selection illus¬
trates how the colonists’ fear of power and British cor¬
ruption convinced them that the new British measures
were part of a malignant conspiracy among men in
power in Britain against colonial, and ultimately all
British, liberty. The second and third pieces suggest how
the colonists’ fear of their own internal corruption col¬
ored their reaction to the crucial events after 1764.
BERNARD baxlyn (b. 1922) is a member of the Depart¬
ment of History at Harvard University; perry miller
(1905-1964) was, for most of his scholarly career, a
member of the Department of English at the same
university.
207
208 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The Logic of Rebellion
BERNARD BAILYN
It is the meaning imparted to the events after 1763 by this
integrated group of attitudes and ideas that lies behind the
colonists’ rebellion. In the context of these ideas, the controversial
issues centering on the question of Parliament’s jurisdiction in
America acquired as a group new and overwhelming significance.
The colonists believed they saw emerging from the welter of
events during the decade after the Stamp Act a pattern whose
meaning was unmistakable. They saw in the measures taken by
the British government and in the actions of officials in the
colonies something for which their peculiar inheritance of thought
had prepared them only too well, something they had long con¬
ceived to be a possibility in view of the known tendencies of
history and of the present state of affairs in England. They saw
about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even
evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested,
but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate
conspiracy launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty
both in England and in America. The danger to America, it was
believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of
the greater whole whose ultimate manifestation would be nothing
less than the destruction of the English constitution with all the
rights and privileges embedded in it.
This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists’ struggle,
and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition.
For, once grasped, it could not be easily dispelled: denial only
confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they
believe; the ostensible, for them, is not the real; and the real is
deliberately malign.
It was this—the overwhelming evidence, as they saw it, that
they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at
all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled—that was
signaled to the colonists after 1763, and it was this above all else
that in the end propelled them into Revolution.
Reprinted v/ith permission of the publishers from Pamphlets of the
American Revolution , 1750—1776, Volume I: 1775—1765 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1965), 60-85. Copyright, 1965, by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
BERNARD BAILYN 20Q
Suspicion that an active conspiracy of power against liberty
existed and involved the colonies directly was deeply rooted in
the consciousness of a large segment of the American population;
it had assumed specific form before any of the famous political
events of the struggle with England took place. No adherent of
a nonconformist church or sect in the eighteenth century was
free from suspicion that the Church of England, an arm of the
English state, was working to bring all subjects of the crown into
the community of the Church; and since toleration was official
and nonconformist influence in English politics formidable, it
was doing so by stealth, disguising its efforts, turning to improper
uses devices that had been created for benign purposes. In par¬
ticular, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, an arm of the Church created in 1701 to aid in bringing
the Gospel to the pagan Indians, was said by 1763 to have "long
had a formal design to root out Presbyterianism, etc., and to
establishing both episcopacy and bishops” 1
This suspicion, which had smoldered in the breasts of New
Englanders and nonconformists throughout the colonies for half
a century or more, had burst into flame repeatedly, but never so
violently as in 1763, in the Mayhew-Apthorp controversy which
climaxed years of growing anxiety that plans were being made
secredy to establish an American episcopate. To Mayhew, as to
Presbyterian and Congregational leaders throughout the colonies,
there could be little doubt that the threat was real. Many of
the facts were known, facts concerning maneuvers in London and
in America. Anglican leaders in New York and New Jersey had
met almost publicly to petition England for an American episco¬
pate, and there could be litde doubt also of the role of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in this undercover operation.
For if the ostensible goal of the Society was the gospelizing of the
pagan Indians and Negroes, its true goal was manifestly revealed
when it established missions in places like Cambridge, Massachu¬
setts, which had not had a resident Indian since the seventeenth
century and was well equipped with “orthodox” preachers. Such
missions, Mayhew wrote, have “all the appearance of entering
wedges . . . carrying on the crusade, or spiritual siege of our
churches, with the hope that they will one day submit to an
episcopal sovereign.” Bishops, he wrote unblinkingly in reply to
Jonathan Mayhew, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts . . . (Boston,
1763), pp. 103-108.
210 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the Archbishop of Canterbury, have commonly been instruments
in arbitrary reigns of “establishing a tyranny over the bodies and
souls of men,” and their establishment in America would mark
the end of liberty in Massachusetts and elsewhere. By 1765, when
the final exchanges in this pamphlet war were published, it was
commonly understood in New England and elsewhere that “the
stamping and episcopizing [of] our colonies were . . . only differ¬
ent branches of the same plan of power’ 92
Fear of an ecclesiastical conspiracy against American liberties,
latent among nonconformists through all of colonial history, thus
erupted into public controversy at the very same time that the
first impact of new British policies in civil affairs was being felt.
And though it was, in an obvious sense, a limited fear (for large
parts of the population identified themselves with the Anglican
church and were not easily convinced that liberty was being
threatened by a plot of Churchmen) it nevertheless had a profound
indirect effect everywhere, for it stimulated among highly articu¬
late leaders of public opinion, who would soon be called upon to
interpret the tendency of civil affairs, a general sense that they
lived in a conspiratorial world in which what the highest officials
professed was not what they in fact intended, and that their words
masked a malevolent design. 3
Reinforcement for this belief came quickly. Even for those who
had in no way been concerned with the threat of an episcopal
establishment, the passage of the Stamp Act was not merely an
impolitic and unjust law that threatened the priceless right of
the individual to retain possession of his property until he or his
chosen representative voluntarily gave it up to another; it was to
many, also, a danger signal indicating that a more general
threat existed. For though it could be argued, and in a sense
proved by the swift repeal of the act, that nothing more was in¬
volved than ignorance or confusion on the part of people in
Mayhew, Observations , p. 57; Jonathan Mayhew, Remarks on an Anony¬
mous Tract . . . Being a Second Defence . . . (Boston, 1764), p. 12; Alden
Bradford, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew . . .
(Boston, 1838), p. 372. For a full account of "the Anglican Plot,” see Carl
Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre (New York, 1962), chaps, vii-ix. See also
Introduction to [John Aplin], Verses on Doctor Mayhew’s Book of Observa¬
tions (Providence, 1763: JHL Pamphlet 3).
a Thus John Adams drew the theme of his Dissertation on the Canon and
Feudal Law (1765) from the association of the episcopal "plot” and the
Stamp Act; see especially the concluding section ("there seems to be a
direct and formal design on foot to enslave all America”) in Charles Francis
Adams, ed.. The Works of John Adams . . . (Boston, 1850-1856), HI, 464.
On this association in general, see Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre , chap, ix:
"Bishops and Stamps, 1764-1766.”
BERNARD BAILYN 211
power who really knew better and who, once warned by the
reaction of the colonists, would not repeat the mistake—though
this could be, and by many was, concluded, there nevertheless
appeared to be good reason to suspect that more was involved.
For from whom had the false information and evil advice come
that had so misled the English government? From officials in the
colonies, said John Adams, said Oxenbridge Thacher, James Otis,
and Stephen Hopkins—from officials bent on overthrowing the
constituted forms of government in order to satisfy their own
lust for power, and not likely to relent in their passion. Some of
these local plotters were easily identified. To John Adams, Josiah
Quincy, and others the key figure in Massachusetts from the be¬
ginning to the end was Thomas Hutchinson who by “serpentine
wiles” was befuddling and victimizing the weak, the avaricious,
and the incautious in order to increase his notorious engrossment
of public office. In Rhode Island it was, to James Otis, that “little,
dirty, drinking, drabbing, contaminated knot of thieves, beggars,
and transports . . . made up of Turks, Jews, and other infidels,
with a few renegado Christians and Catholics”—the Newport
junto, led by Martin Howard, Jr., which had already been ac¬
cused by Stephen Hopkins and others in Providence of “conspiring
against the liberties of the colony.” 4
But even if local leaders associated with power elements in
England had not been so suspect, there were grounds for seeing
4 For a succinct explanation of the manifest threat of the Stamp Act, see
Stephen Hopkins, Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, 1765: JHL
Pamphlet 9), pp. 16-17. Adams' almost paranoiac suspicions of Hutchin¬
son's hidden motives run through his Diary and Autobiography (L. H.
Butterfield, ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1961); e.g., I, 306; II, 39; III, 430.
See also Novanglus and Massachusettensis . . . (Boston, 1819), pp. 49—50,
68 ; Works, X, 285-286, 298. It is the generality of such suspicions
that accounts for the furor caused by the publication in 1773 of
Hutchinson's innocuous letters of 1768—letters in which, the publishers
wrote in the pamphlet’s title, “the Judicious Reader Will Discover the Fatal
Source of the Confusion and Bloodshed.” Josiah Quincy thought he saw
the final proof of Hutchinson's conspiratorial efforts in his maneuverings
with the North administration in London in 1774 and 1775: “Journal of
Josiah Quincy Jun. ... in England . . . ,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, 50 (1916-1917), 444, 446, 447, 450, 452. Thacher's
suspicions of Hutchinson (whom he called “Sunrnia Potestatis,” or “Summa”
for short), are traced in the Introduction to his Sentiments of a British
American (Boston, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 8 ). Otis' phrase is quoted from his
abusive pamphlet, Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel . . .
(Boston, 1765), p. 5. The charge against Howard appeared in the Providence
Gazette, Sept. 15, 1764, and is part of the intense antipathy that built up
in Providence against the royalist group in Newport. See, in general, Edmund
S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis . . . (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953),
chap, iv; and Introduction to Howard's Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax
(Newport, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 10).
212 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
more behind the Stamp Act than its ostensible purpose. The
official aim of the act was, of course, to bring in revenue to the
English treasury. But the sums involved were in fact quite small,
and "some persons . . . may be inclined to acquiesce under it.”
But that would be to fall directly into the trap, for the smaller
the taxes, John Dickinson wrote in the most influential pamphlet
published in America before 1776, the more dangerous they were,
since they would the more easily be found acceptable by the
incautious, with the result that a precedent would be established
for making still greater inroads on liberty and property.
Nothing is wanted at home but a precedent, the force of which
shall be established by the tacit submission of the colonies. . . . If the
Parliament succeeds in this attempt, other statutes will impose other
duties . . . and thus the Parliament will levy upon us such sums of
money as they choose to take, without any other limitation than their
PLEASURE.5
But by then, in 1768, when Dickinson’s Farmer's Letters were
published as a pamphlet, more explicit evidence of a wide-ranging
plot was accumulating rapidly. Not only had another revenue
act, the Townshend Duties, been passed by Parliament despite
all the violence of the colonists’ reaction to the Stamp Act, but
it was a measure that enhanced the influence of the customs
administration, which for other reasons had already come under
suspicion. There had been, it was realized by the late 1760’s, a
sudden expansion in the number of "posts in the [colonial]
"government’ . . . worth the attention of persons of influence in
Great Britain" —posts, Franklin explained, like the governorships,
filled by persons who were
generally strangers to the provinces they are sent to govern, have no
estate, natural connection, or relation there to give them an affection
for the country . . . they come only to make money as fast as they
can; are sometimes men of vicious characters and broken fortunes,
sent by a minister merely to get them out of the way. 6
By the late 1760’s, in the perspective of recent events, one could
see that the invasion of customs officers "bom with long claws
6 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania . . . (Philadelphia, 1768), in
Paul L. Ford, ed., "Writings of John Dickinson (Memoirs of the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania, XIV, Philadelphia, 1895), 382.
•Dickinson, Farmer's Letters, in Ford, Writings, p. 380; Albert H. Smyth,
ed.. Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1905-1907), V, 83. Cf.
Vemer W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press , 1758-1775
(Chapel Hill, 1950), pp. 105-107, 277.
BERNARD BAILYN 213
like eagles/’ had begun as far back as the last years of the Seven
Years’ War and was now being reinforced by the new tax meas¬
ures. The wartime Orders in Council demanding stricter enforce¬
ment of the Navigation Laws; the Sugar Act of 1764, which had
multiplied the customs personnel; and the American Board of
Customs Commissioners created in 1767 with “power,” Americans
said, “to constitute as many under officers as they please”—all
of these developments could be seen to have provided for an
“almost incredible number of inferior officers,” most of whom
the colonists believed to be “wretches ... of such infamous char¬
acters that the merchants cannot possibly think their interest safe
under their care.” More important by far, however, was their
influence on government.
For there was an obvious political and constitutional danger in
having such “a set of idle drones," such ‘lazy, proud, worthless
pensioners and placemen," in one’s midst. It was nothing less
than “a general maxim,” James Wilson wrote,
that the crown will take advantage of every opportunity of extending
its prerogative in opposition to the privileges of the people, [and] that
it is the interest of those who have pensions or offices at will from the
crown to concur in all its measures.
These “baneful harpies” were instruments of power, of preroga¬
tive. They would upset the balance of the constitution by extending
“ministerial influence as much beyond its former bounds as the
late war did the British dominions.” Parasitic officeholders, thor¬
oughly corrupted by their obligations to those who had appointed
them, would strive to “distinguish themselves by their sordid zeal
in defending and promoting measures which they know beyond
all questionsi to be destructive to the just rights and true interest
of their country.” Seeking to “serve the ambitious purposes of
great men at home,” these “base-spirited wretches" would urge—
were already urging—as they logically had to, the specious attrac¬
tions of “submissive behavior.” They were arguing
with a plausible affection of wisdom and concern how prudent it
is to please the powerful —how dangerous to provoke them—and then
comes in the perpetual incantation that freezes up every generous
purpose of the soul in cold, inactive expectation—“that if there is any
request to be made, compliance will obtain a favorable attention.”
In the end, this extension of executive patronage, based on a
limitless support of government through colonial taxation, would
make the whole of government “merely a ministerial engine”; by
214 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
throwing off the balance of its parts, it would destroy the pro¬
tective machinery of the constitution. 7
But even this did not exhaust the evidence that a design against
liberty was unfolding. During the same years the independence
of the judiciary, so crucial a part of the constitution, was suddenly
seen to be under heavy attack, and by the mid-1760’s to have
succumbed in many places. 8
This too was not a new problem. The status of the colonial
judiciary had been a controversial question throughout the cen¬
tury. The Parliamentary statute of 1701 which guaranteed judges
in England life tenure in their posts had been denied to the colo¬
nies, in part because properly trained lawyers were scarce in the
colonies, especially in the early years, and appointments for life
would prevent the replacement of ill-qualified judges by their
betters, when they appeared; and in part because, judicial salaries
being provided for by temporary legislative appropriations, the
removal of all executive control from the judiciary, it was feared,
would result in the hopeless subordination of the courts to popular
influences. The status of the judiciary in the eighteenth century
was therefore left open to political maneuvering in which, more
often than not, the home government managed to carry its point
and to make the tenure of judges as temporary as their salaries.
Then suddenly, in the early 1760’s, the whole issue exploded. In
1759 the Pennsylvania Assembly declared that the judges of that
province would thereafter hold their offices by the same perma¬
nence of tenure that had been guaranteed English judges after
the Glorious Revolution. But the law was disallowed forthwith
7 [Silas Downer], Discourse Delivered in Providence ... at the Dedication
of the Tree of Liberty . . . (Providence, 1768), p. 10; Ebenezer Baldwin,
An Appendix Stating the Heavy Grievances . . . , published in Samuel
Sherwood, A Sermon Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers . . .
(New Haven, [1774]), pp. 52-53; Observations on Several Acts of Parlia¬
ment . . . and Also on the Conduct of the Officers of the Customs . . .
([Boston], 1769), p. 15; William Gordon, Discourse Preached December 15th
1774 . . . (Boston, 1775), p. 11; [James Wilson], Considerations on the . . .
Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774), pp.
6-7; Dickinson, Farmer's Letters , in Ford, Writings , pp. 382, 398n, 399-
400; Votes and Proceedings of .. . Boston . . . (Boston, [1772]), p. 21. See
also, among the voluminous expressions of resentment and fear of petty
officeholders in the colonies, [Henry Laurens], Extracts from the Proceedings
of the High Court of Vice-Admiralty in Charlestown . . . with . . . Observa¬
tions on American Custom-House Officers . . . (Charleston, 1769); and A
Ministerial Catechise, Suitable To Be Learned by All . . . Pensioners, Place¬
men . . . (Boston, 1771).
®For further details on the problem of the judiciary, and for documenta¬
tion of the paragraphs that follow, see the Introduction and notes to A
Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1760: JHL Pamphlet 2).
BERNARD BAILYN 215
by the crown. Opposition newspapers boiled with resentment;
angry speeches were made in the Assembly; and a pamphlet
appeared explaining in the fullest detail the bearing of judicial
independence on constitutional freedom.
In New York the issue was even more inflamed and had wider
repercussions. There, the judges of the Supreme Court, by a
political maneuver of 1750, had managed to secure their appoint¬
ments for life. But this tenure was interrupted by the death of
George II in 1760 which required the reissuance of all crown
commissions. An unpopular and politically weak lieutenant gov¬
ernor, determined to prevent his enemies from controlling the
courts, refused to recommission the judges on life tenure. The
result was a ferocious battle in which the opposition asserted New
York’s “undoubted right of having the judges of our courts on a
constitutional basis,” and demanded the ‘liberties and privileges”
of Englishmen in this connection as in all others. But they were
defeated, though not by the governor. In December 1761 orders
were sent out from the King in Council to all the colonies, perma¬
nently forbidding the issuance of judges’ commissions anywhere
on any tenure but that of “the pleasure of the crown.” 9
All the colonies were affected. In some, like New Jersey, where
the governor’s incautious violation of the new royal order led to
his removal from office, or like North Carolina, where opposition
forces refused to concede and managed to keep up the fight for
permanent judicial tenure throughout the entire period from 1760
to 1776, the issue was directly joined. In others, as in Massa¬
chusetts, where specific supreme court appointments were vehe¬
mently opposed by anti-administration interests, the force of the
policy was indirect. But everywhere there was bitterness at the
decree and fear of its implications, for everywhere it was known
that judicial tenure “at the will of the crown” was “dangerous to
the liberty and property of the subject,” and that if the bench
were occupied by “men who depended upon the smiles of the
crown for their daily bread,” the possibility of having an inde¬
pendent judiciary as an effective check upon executive power
would be wholly lost. 10
®Milton M. Klein, ‘Trelude to Revolution in New York: Jury Trials and
Judicial Tenure,” 'William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 17 (1960), 452.
10 [W illi am H. Drayton], A Letter from Freeman of South-CaroUna . . .
(Charleston, 1774), pp. 10, 20. For other characteristic expressions of the
fear of a corrupt judiciary, see [John Allen], An Oration upon the Beauties
of Liberty . . . (Boston, 1773), pp. 21 ff.: The Conduct of Cadwallader
Colden . . . ([New York], 1767), reprinted in Collections of the New-York
Historical Society, X (New York, 1877), 433-467; [John Allen], The Ameri-
216 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
This fear was magnified by the rumor, which was circulating
vigorously as early as 1768, that it was part of the administra¬
tion’s policy to have the salaries of the colonial judges “appointed
for them by the crown, independent of the people.” If this ever
happened, the Boston Town Meeting asserted when the rumor
was becoming actuality, it would “complete our slavery.” The
reasoning was simple and straightforward:
if taxes are to be raised from us by the Parliament of Great Britain
without our consent, and the men on whose opinions and decisions
our properties, liberties, and fives in a great measure depend receive
their support from the revenues arising from these taxes, we cannot,
when we think of the depravity of mankind, avoid looking with
horror on the danger to which we are exposed!
“More and more,” as the people contemplated the significance of
crown salaries for a judiciary that served “at pleasure,” was it
clear that “the designs of administration [were] totally to subvert
the constitution.” Any judge, the House in Massachusetts ulti¬
mately stated, who accepted such salaries would thereby declare
“that he has not a due sense of the importance of an impartial
administration of justice, that he is an enemy to the constitution,
and has it in his heart to promote the establishment of an arbi¬
trary government in the province.” 11
Long before this, however, another aspect of the judicial sys-
tem was believed also to have come under deliberate attack. The
jury system, it was said, in New York particularly but elsewhere
as well, was being systematically undermined. In New York the
same executive who had fought the permanent tenure of judges
insisted on the legality of allowing jury decisions, on matters of
fact as well as of law, to be appealed to the governor and Council.
This effort, though defeated within a year by action of the Board
of Trade in England, had a lasting impact on the political con¬
sciousness of New Yorkers. It was publicly assailed, in the year
of the Stamp Act, as “arbitrary” and “scandalous” in its deliberate
subversion of the British constitution. 12
Associated with this but more important because more wide¬
spread in its effect was the extension and enforcement of the
can Alarm . . . (Boston, 1773), 1st sec., pp. 17, 20, 27, 28; Votes and
Proceedings of Boston y pp. 37—38; Adams, Diary and Autobiography , II 36
65-67; III, 297 ff. * *
n Votes and Proceedings of Boston , p. 20; Thomas Hutchinson, History of
. . . Massachusetts-Bay (Lawrence S. Mayo, ed., Cambridge, 1936), III, 278,
279.
12 Klein, ‘Trelude to Revolution in New York,” pp. 453-459.
BERNARD BAILYN 217
jurisdiction of the vice-admiralty courts—“prerogative” courts
composed not of juries but of single judges whose posts were
political offices in the hands of the royal governors, to be be¬
stowed upon deserving friends and supporters.” Since these courts
had jurisdiction over the enforcement of all laws of trade and
navigation as well as over ordinary marine matters, they had
always been potentially threatening to the interests of the colonists.
But in the past, by one means or another, they had been cur¬
tailed in their effect, and much of their business had been shunted
off to common law courts dominated by juries. Suddenly in the
1760’s they acquired a great new importance, for it was into their
hands that the burden of judicial enforcement of the new Parlia¬
mentary legislation fell. It was upon them, consequently, and
upon the whole principle of “prerogative” courts that abuse was
hurled as the effect of their enhanced power was felt. "What has
America done, victims of the decisions of these courts asked, “to
be thus particularized, to be disfranchised and stripped of so
invaluable a privilege as the trial by jury?” The operations of
the vice-admiralty courts, it was felt, especially after their admini¬
strative reorganization in 1767, denied Americans a crucial meas¬
ure of the protection of the British constitution. "However respec¬
table the judge may be, it is however an hardship and severity
which distinguishes [defendants before this court] from the rest
of Englishmen.” The evils of such prerogative invasion of the
judiciary could hardly be exaggerated: their “enormous created
powers . . . threatens future generations in America with a curse
tenfold worse than the Stamp Act.” 13
The more one looked the more one found evidences of deliberate
malevolence. In Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson’s elaborate
patronage machine, long in existence but fully organized only
after the arrival of Governor Francis Bernard in 1760, appeared
to suspicious tribunes like Oxenbridge Thacher and John Adams
to constitute a serious threat to liberty. The Hutchinsons and the
Olivers and their ambitious allies, it was said (and the view was
widely circulated through the colonies), had managed, by ac¬
cumulating a massive plurality of offices, to engross the power of
all branches of the Massachusetts government thereby building
a “foundation sufficient on which to erect a tyranny.”
w Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill, 1960), pp. 112, 125-126. For further expressions of antipathy
to the admiralty courts, see especially the Laurens pamphlet cited in note
7 above, and . . . Adams, Works, III, 466—467; Votes and Proceedings of
Boston, p. 24.
218 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Bernard had all the executive, and a negative of the legislative;
Hutchinson and Oliver, by their popular arts and secret intrigues, had
elevated to the [Council] such a collection of crown officers, and their
own relations, as to have too much influence there; and they had
three of a family on the superior bench. . . . This junto therefore had
the legislative and executive in their control, and more natural in¬
fluence over the judicial than is ever to be trusted to any set of men
in the world.
With encouragement, no doubt, from England, they were stretch¬
ing their power beyond all proper bounds, becoming “conspirators
against the public liberty.” 14
The same evil of plural officeholding, tending to destroy the
protective mechanism of the separation of powers, was observed
to be at work in South Carolina. In both cases the filiation be¬
tween the engrossing of offices in England and in America could
be said to be direct. The self-seeking monopolists of office in the
colonies, advancing themselves and their faithful adherents “to
the exclusion of much better men,” Adams wrote somewhat plain¬
tively, were as cravenly obedient to their masters in power in
England as their own despicable “creatures” were to them. 15 How
deep this issue ran, how powerful its threat, could be seen best
when one noted the degree to which it paralleled cognate develop¬
ments in England.
John Wilkes’s career was crucial to the colonists’ understand¬
ing of what was happening to them; his fate, the colonists came
to believe, was intimately involved with their own. 16 Not only
was he associated in their minds with general opposition to the
government that passed the Stamp Act and the Townshend
Duties, that was flooding the colonies with parasitic placemen,
and that appeared to be making inroads into the constitution by
weakening the judiciary and bestowing monopolies of public
offices on pliant puppets—not only was he believed to be a na¬
tional leader of opposition to such a government, but he had
entered the public arena first as a victim and then as the suc-
u John Adams (“Novanglus” ), Novanglus and Massachusettensis , pp. 49-
50; Ellen E. Brennan, Plural Office-Holding in Massachusetts 1760-1780
(Chapel Hill, 1945), chaps, i, ii. See also references to Hutchinson, above,
note 4.
15 Drayton, Letter from Freeman, pp. 9, 18-19, 32-33; Edward McCrady,
The History of South Carolina Under the Royal Government 1719-1776
(New York, 1899), pp. 533-535, 710-713; Adams, Diary and Autobiography ,
I, 306; II, 39.
16 For a detailed discussion of the Wilkes affair in the context of the present
discussion, see Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment
with Britain,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3d ser., 20 (1963), 373-395.
BERNARD BAILYN 2ig
cessful antagonist of general warrants, which, in the form of
writs of assistance, the colonists too had fought in heroic epi¬
sodes known throughout the land. He had, moreover, defended
the sanctity of private property against confiscation by the gov¬
ernment. His cause was their cause. His Number 45 North Briton
was as celebrated in the colonies at it was in England, and more
generally approved of; its symbolism became part of the icono¬
graphy of liberty in the colonies. His return from exile in 1768
and subsequent election to Parliament were major events to
Americans. Toasts were offered to him throughout the colonies,
and substantial contributions to his cause as well as adulatory
letters were sent by Sons of Liberty in Virginia, Maryland, and
South Carolina. A stalwart, independent opponent of encroaching
government power and a believer in the true principles of the
constitution, he was expected to do much in Parliament for the
good of all: so the Bostonians wrote him in June 1768 “your
perseverance in the good old cause may still prevent the great
system from dashing to pieces. ’Tis from your endeavors we hope
for a royal Tascite, ut ante, boves,’ and from our attachment to
'peace and good order’ we wait for a constitutional redress: being
determined that the King of Great Britain shall have subjects
but not slaves in these remote parts of his dominions.” 17
By February 1769 it was well known that “the fate of Wilkes
and America must stand or fall together/' 18 The news, therefore,
that by the maneuvers of the court party Wilkes had been denied
the seat in Parliament to which he had been duly elected came
as a profound shock to Americans. It shattered the hopes of
many that the evils they saw around them had been the result
not of design but of inadvertence, and it portended darker days
ahead. When again, and then for a second, a third, and a fourth
time Wilkes was re-elected to Parliament and still denied his
seat, Americans could only watch with horror and agree with
him that the rights of the Commons, like those of the colonial
Houses, were being denied by a power-hungry government that
assumed to itself the privilege of deciding who should speak
for the people in their own branch of the legislature. Power had
reached directly and brutally into the main agency of liberty.
Surely Wilkes was right: the constitution was being deliberately,
not inadvertently, torn up by its roots.
17 Boston Sons of Liberty to Wilkes, June 6, 1768, Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, 47 (1913-1914), 191. The quotation is
from Virgil, Eclogues i, 45: “pasture your cattle as of old.”
“William Palfrey to Wilkes, February 21, 1769, Proceedings of the Massa¬
chusetts Historical Society , 47 (1913-1914), 197.
220 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Meanwhile an event even more sinister in its implications had
taken place in the colonies themselves. On October 1, 1768, two
regiments of regular infantry, with artillery, disembarked in
Boston. For many months the harassed Governor Bernard had
sought some legal means or excuse for summoning military help
in his vain efforts to maintain if not an effective administration
then at least order in the face of Stamp Act riots, circular letters,
tumultuous town meetings, and assaults on customs officials. But
the arrival of troops in Boston increased rather than decreased
his troubles. For to a populace steeped in the literature of English
radicalism the presence of troops in a peaceful town had such
portentous meaning that resistance instantly stiffened. It was not
the physical threat of the troops that affected the attitudes of the
Bostonians; it was the bearing their arrival had on the likely
tendency of events. Viewed in the perspective of Trenchard’s
writings, these were not simply soldiers assembled for police
duties; they were precisely what history had proved over and
over again to be prime movers of the process by which unwary
nations lose “that precious jewel liberty” Here, in bold, stark
actuality, was a standing army—just such a standing army as had
snuffed out freedom in Denmark. True, British regulars had been
introduced into the colonies on a permanent basis at the end of
the Seven Years’ War; that in itself had been disquieting. But it
could then be argued that troops were needed to police the newly
acquired territories, and that they were not in any case to be
regularly garrisoned in peaceful, populous towns. 19 No such
defense could be made of the troops sent to Boston in 1768. No
simple, ingenuous explanation would suffice. The true motive was
only too apparent for those with eyes to see. One of the classic
stages in the process of destroying free constitutions of govern¬
ment had been reached.
And again significant corroboration could be found in develop¬
ments in England, and support furnished for the belief that events
in America were only part of a larger whole. On May 10, 1768,
a mob assembled in St. George’s Fields, London, in support of
the imprisoned Wilkes was fired upon by the regiment of Foot
Guards that had been summoned by the nervous magistrates.
Several deaths resulted, the most dramatic being that of a boy,
wrongly identified as a leader of the mob, who was tracked down
IS L. H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution . . .
(New York, 1936- ), X, 200-201, 328-329, 408; cf. Bernhard Knollen-
berg. Origin of the American Revolution , 1759-1766 (New York, 1960), pp.
BERNARD BAILYN 221
and shot to death on orders of the commander. The political capi¬
tal made of this misfortune by the Wilkesites and other anti-
government groups in London was echoed loudly in the colonies,
the more so when it appeared that convictions of the guilty
soldiers by normal processes of the law courts were being quashed
by the government. Could it be believed to be a coincidence that
in February 1770 a young Bostonian was also shot to death by
officers of the state? This was more than a parallel to what had
happened in London: the two events were two effects of the same
cause. 20
And then, a few weeks later, came the Boston Massacre. Doubts
that the troops in Boston constituted a standing army and that it
was the purpose of standing armies to terrify a populace into
compliance with tyrannical wills were silenced by that event.
The narrative of the Massacre written by James Bowdoin and
others, which was distributed everywhere in the English-speaking
world, stressed the deliberateness of the shooting and the clarity
of the design that lay behind the lurid event; nor was the parallel
to the St. George's Fields murders neglected. The acquittal of the
indicted soldiers did not alter the conviction that the Massacre
was the logical work of a standing army, for it accentuated the
parallel with the English case which also had concluded with
acquittal; and in Boston too there was suspicion of judicial irregu¬
larities. How the murderers managed to escape was known to
some, it was said, but was “too dark to explain." 21
Unconstitutional taxing, the invasion of placemen, the weak¬
ening of the judiciary, plural officeholding, Wilkes, standing
armies—these were major evidences of a deliberate assault of
“George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), pp. 49 ff.; Maier,
“Wilkes and American Disillusionment,” pp. 386-387.
21 Allen, Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty , p. xiii. [Bowdoin, et ah].
Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston . . . (Boston, 1770), re¬
printed within the year three times in Boston, three times in London and
once (retitled) in Dublin, appears also in Frederic Kidder, History of the
Boston Massacre . . . (Albany, 1870); for the direct association of the
Massacre with the problem of standing armies, see Kidder, History , p. 27.
The annual Massacre Day orators played up this association in lurid detail:
see, for example, Joseph Warren, An Oration . . . (Boston, 1772), pp. 11-
12; John Hancock, An Oration . . . (Boston, 1774), pp. 13—15. The view of
the Massacre held by John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., the lawyers who
successfully defended the soldiers in court, is especially important. Both
thought the Massacre was “the strongest of proofs of the danger of standing
armies” despite their efforts on the soldiers 7 behalf; Adams saw nothing
incompatible between the verdict of the jury and his being invited to
deliver one of the orations commemorating the Massacre. Josiah Quincy,
Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun. . . . (Boston, 1825), p. 67; Adams,
Diary and Autobiography , II, 74, 79.
222 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
power upon liberty. Lesser testimonies were also accumulating at
the same time: small episodes in themselves, they took on a large
significance in the context in which they were received. Writs
of assistance in support of custom officials were working their
expected evil: our houses, and even our bedchambers, are ex¬
posed to be ransacked, our boxes, trunks, and chests broke open,
ravaged and plundered by wretches whom no prudent man would
venture to employ even as menial servants.” Legally convened
legislatures had been adjourned . . . to a place highly incon¬
venient to die members and gready disadvantageous to the interest
of the province”; they had been prorogued and dissolved at execu¬
tive whim. Even the boundaries of colonies had been tampered
with, whereby rights of soil’ had been eliminated at a stroke.
When in 1772 the Boston Town Meeting met to draw up a full
catalogue of the “infringements and violations” of the “rights of
the colonists, and of this province in particular, as men, as
Christians, and as subjects, it approved a list of twelve items,
which took seventeen pamphlet pages to describe. 22
But then, for a two-year period, there was a detente of sorts
created by the repeal of the Townshend Duties, the withdrawal of
troops from Boston, and the failure of other provocative measures
to be taken. It ended abruptly, however, in the fall and winter
of 1773, when, with a terrifying rush, the tendencies earlier noted
were brought to fu l fi llm ent. In the space of a few weeks, all the
dark, twisted roots of malevolence were finally revealed, plainly,
for all to see.
The turning point was the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.
Faced by this defiant resistance to intimidation, the powers at
work in England, it was believed, gave up all pretense of legality
“threw off the mask,” John Adams said—and moved swiftly to
complete their design. In a period of two months in the spring
of 1774 Parliament took its revenge in a series of coercive actions
no liberty-loving people could tolerate: the Boston Port Act, in¬
tended, it was believed, to snuff out the economic life of” the
Massachusetts metropolis; the Administration of Justice Act,
aimed at crippling judicial processes once and for all by permitting
trials to be held in England for offenses committed in Massachu¬
setts; the Massachusetts Government Act, which stripped from the
people of Massachusetts the protection of the British constitution
by giving over all the “democratic” elements of the province’s
government—even popularly elected juries and town meetings—
’’Votes and Proceedings of Boston, pp. 13-30.
BERNARD BAILYN 223
into the hands of the executive power; the Quebec Act, which,
while not devised as a part of the coercive program, fitted it nicely,
in the eyes of the colonists, by extending the boundaries of a
“papist” province, and one governed wholly by prerogative, south
into territory claimed by Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts;
finally, the Quartering Act, to take effect in all colonies, which per¬
mitted the seizure for the use of troops of all buildings, public
and private, deserted and occupied.
Once these coercive acts were passed there could be little doubt
that “the system of slavery fabricated against America ... is the
offspring of mature deliberation.” To the leaders of the Revolu¬
tionary movement there was, beyond question, “a settled, fixed
plan for enslaving the colonies, or bringing them under arbitrary
government, and indeed the nation too.” By 1774 the idea “that
the British government—the King, Lords, and Commons —have
laid a regular plan to enslave America, and that they are now
deliberately putting it in execution” had been asserted, Samuel
Seabury wrote wearily but accurately, “over, and over, and over
again.” The less inhibited of the colonial orators were quick to
point out that “the monster of a standing army” had sprung
directly from “a plan . . . systematically laid and pursued by the
British ministry near twelve years for enslaving America”; the
Boston Massacre, it was claimed, had been “planned by Hills¬
borough and a knot of treacherous knaves in Boston.” Careful
analysts like Jefferson agreed on the major point; in one of the
most closely reasoned of the pamphlets of 1774 the Virginian
stated unambiguously that though “single acts of tyranny may be
ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day ... a series of oppres¬
sions begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably
through every change of ministers too plainly prove a deliberate
and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And the fastidious
and scholarly John Dickinson, though in 1774 he still clung to the
hope that inadvertence, at least on the part of the King, was in¬
volved, believed that “a plan had been deliberately framed and
pertinaciously adhered to, unchanged even by frequent changes
of ministers, unchecked by any intervening gleam of humanity,
to sacrifice to a passion for arbitrary dominion the universal prop¬
erty, liberty, safety, honor, happiness, and prosperity of us un¬
offending yet devoted Americans.” Some sought to date the origins
of the plot. Josiah Quincy found it in the Restoration of Charles II;
and though John Adams, with one eye on Thomas Hutchinson,
wrote in 1774 that “the conspiracy was first regularly formed and
begun to be executed in 1763 or 4,” later he traced it back to
224 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the 1750’s and forties and the administration of Governor Shirley
of Massachusetts. Nor were the stages of its development ne¬
glected. They could be traced, if in no other place then in the
notorious Hutchinson letters of 1768-1769, those “profoundly
secret, dark, and deep” letters which, published in 1773, totally
exposed Hutchinson’s “machiavellian dissimulation,” John Adams
wrote, and convicted him of “junto conspiracy”; they gave proof,
the Boston Committee of Correspondence wrote, that God had
“wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been
laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies.” 23
But who, specifically, were these enemies, and what were their
goals? Local plotters like Hutchinson were clearly only “creatures”
of greater figures in England coordinating and impelling forward
the whole effort. There were a number of specific identifications
of these master influences. One, which appeared in 1773, claimed
that at the root of the evil stood the venerable John Stuart, Lord
Bute, whose apparent absence from politics during the previous
decade could be seen as one of his more successful dissimula¬
tions: “he has been aiming for years ... to destroy the ancient
right of the subjects,” and now was finally taking steps to “over¬
throw both . . . King and state; to bring on a revolution, and to
place another whom he [is] more nearly allied to upon the throne.”
Believing the people to “have too much liberty,” he intended to
reduce them to the “spiritless SLAVES” they had been “in the reign
of the Stuarts.” 2 * A more general version of this view was that a
^[Alexander Hamilton], A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Con¬
fess . . . (New York, 1774), in H. C. Lodge, ed., Works (New York and
London, 1904), I, 10; Baldwin, Appendix , p. 67; [Samuel Seabury], A View
of the Controversy . . . (New York, 1774), in Clarence H. Vance, ed., Letters
of a Westchester Farmer . . . (1774-1775) (Publications of the Westchester
County Historical Society, VIII, White Plains, 1930), p. 123; Oliver Noble,
Some Strictures upon the . . . Book of Esther . . . (Newburyport, 1775), pp.
28, 26; Hancock, Oration, p. 9; [Jefferson], A Summary View . . . (Williams¬
burg, 1774), in Paul L. Ford, ed.. Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York,
1892-1899), I, 435; on the development of Dickinson’s understanding of the
cause of the crisis, see Introduction to his Late Regulations (Philadelphia,
1765: JHL Pamphlet 14); Quincy, Observations on the .. . Boston Port-Bill
with Thoughts on . . . Standing Armies (Boston, 1774), in Quincy, Memoir,
p. 446 (cf. pp. 464—465); Adams, Works , X, 242-243 (for Adams’ full elab¬
oration of the ministry’s “dark intrigues and wicked machinations” so clearly
dovetailed with the Hutchinson clique’s maneuverings, see Novanglus and
Massachusettensis, pp. 15 ff., 49—50, 55, 71—72; Diary and Autobiography,
II, 80, 90, 119); John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston,
1943), p. 332. For other expressions of the fear of “a constant, unremitted,
uniform aim to enslave us,” see Votes and Proceedings of Boston, pp. 30*
37; Allen, American Alarm, 1st sec., pp. 8-9, 17, 18, 33; Edmund S. Morgan’
The Gentle Puritan (New Haven, 1962), pp. 263-265.
Allen, American Alarm, 1st sec., pp. 18—19; cf. the same author’s refer¬
ence to “Scotch barbarian troops” at the St. George’s Fields riot, in Oration
upon the Beauties of Liberty, p. xiii.
BERNARD BAILYN 225
Stuart-Tory party, the "corrupt, Frenchified party in the nation,”
as it was described in 1766, was at work seeking to reverse the
consequences of the Glorious Revolution. It was this notion that
led to the republication of Rapin’s Dissertation on .. . the Whigs
and Tories in Boston in 1773; and it was this notion that furnished
Jefferson with his ultimate understanding of the "system” that
sought to destroy liberty in America. 25 Still another explanation
emphasized the greed of a "monied interest” created by the crown’s
financial necessities during the Seven Years’ Wax. The creation of
this group was accompanied "by levying of taxes, by a host of tax
gatherers, and a long train of dependents of the crown. The prac¬
tice grew into system, till at length the crown found means to
break down those barriers which the constitution had assigned to
each branch of the legislature, and effectually destroyed the in¬
dependence of both Lords and Commons.” 26
The most common explanation, however—an explanation al¬
most universally accepted even after the Declaration of Inde¬
pendence placed responsibility officially on the King himself—
located "the spring and cause of all the distresses and complaints
of the people in England or in America” in "a kind of fourth
power that the constitution knows nothing of, or has not provided
against.” This "overruling arbitrary power, which absolutely con¬
trols the King, Lords, and Commons,” was composed, it was said,
of the "ministers and favorites” of the King, who, in defiance of
God and man alike, "extend their usurped authority infinitely too
25 [Stephen Johnson], Some Important Observations . . . (Newport, 1766),
p. 15. Jefferson’s explanation appeared first as notes he jotted down on
reading Francois Soule’s Histoire des troubles de VAmerique anglaise (Lon¬
don, 1785) at the point where George Ill’s education is mentioned: "The
education of the present King was Tory. He gave decisive victories to the
Tories. To these were added sundry rich persons sprung up in the E. I.
America would have been too formidable a weight in the scale of the
Whigs. It was necessary therefore to reduce them by force to concur with
the Tories.” Later he wrote more formally to Soule: "The seeds of the war
are here traced to their true source. The Tory education of the King was
the first preparation for that change in the British government which that
party never ceases to wish. This naturally ensured Tory administrations
during his life. At the moment he came to die throne and cleared his hands
of his enemies by the peace of Paris, the assumptions of unwarrantable
right over America commenced; they were so signal, and followed one
another so close as to prove they were part of a system either to reduce it
under absolute subjection and thereby make it an instrument for attempts
on Britain itself, or to sever it from Britain so that it might not be a weight
in the Whig scale. This latter alternative however was not considered as
the one which would take place. They knew so little of America that they
thought it unable to encounter the little finger of Great Britain.” The
Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton, 1950-), X,
373n2, 369.
^[Carter Braxton], An Address to . . . Virginia; on the Subject of Govern¬
ment . . . (Philadelphia, 1776), p. 10.
226 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
fax,” and, throwing off the balance of the constitution, make their
"despotic will” the authority of the nation.
For their power and interest is so great that they can and do pro¬
cure whatever laws they please, having (by power, interest, and the
application of the people's money to placemen and pensioners) the
whole legislative authority at their command. So that it is plain (not to
say a word of a particular reigning arbitrary Stuarchal power among
them) that the rights of the people are ruined and destroyed by
ministerial tyrannical authority, and thereby . . . become a kind of
slaves to the ministers of state.
This "junto of courtiers and state-jobbers,” these "court-locusts,”
whispering in the royal ear, "instill in the King's mind a divine
right of authority to command his subjects” at the same time as
they advance their "detestable scheme” by misinforming and mis¬
leading the people. 27
It was a familiar notion that had served in England for genera¬
tions to justify opposition to a crown that could do no wrong, and
it had recently been revived by both Pitt and Burke echoing the
earlier eloquence of Bolingbroke. It had, moreover, a particular
familiarity in New England, and elsewhere in the colonies, where
people generally were acquainted with the Book of Esther and
hence had a model for a ministerial conspiracy in the story of that
"tyrannic bloodthirsty minister of state,” Haman, at the court
of Ahasuerus. There he was, wrote the Newbury, Massachusetts,
minister Oliver Noble in 1775, " Haman the Premier, and his junto
of court favorites, flatterers, and dependents in the royal city, to¬
gether with governors of the provinces, councilors, boards of trade,
commissioners and their creatures, officers and collectors of rev¬
enue, solicitors, assistants, searchers, and inspectors, down to
tide-waiters and their scribes, and the good Lord knows whom
and how many of them, together with the coachmen and servants
of the whole . . .”— [footnote:] "Not that I am certain the Persian
state had all these officers . . . or that the underofficers of state
rode in coaches or chariots . . . But as the Persian monarchy was
despotic ... it is highly probable . . ” The story was so well
known: ". . . now behold the decree obtained! The bloody plan
ripened!” The " cruel perpetrators of the horrid plot and a ban¬
ditti of ministerial tools through the provinces” had everything in
readiness. “But behold! ... A merciful god heard the cries of this
oppressed people . . .” The parallels were closely drawn; Haman:
a Allen, American Alarm, 1st sec., pp. 8—9; Noble, Some Strictures , p. 6;
Allen, Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, p. 29.
BERNARD BAILYN 227
Lord North; Esther and the Jews: the colonists; and Mordicai:
Franklin. 28
But why were not these manipulators of prerogative satisfied
with amassing power at home? Why the attention to faraway
provinces in America? Several answers were offered, besides the
general one that power naturally seeks to drive itself everywhere,
into every pocket of freedom. One explanation was that the court,
having reached a limit in the possibilities of patronage and spoils
in the British Isles, sought a quarrel with the colonies as an excuse
for confiscating their wealth. ‘The long and scandalous list of
placemen and pensioners and the general profligacy and prodi¬
gality of the present reign exceed the annual supplies. England is
drained by taxes, and Ireland impoverished to almost the last
farthing . . . America was the only remaining spot to which their
oppression and extortion had not fully reached, and they con¬
sidered her as a fallow field from which a large income might be
drawn . . When the colonists’ reaction to the Stamp Act proved
that “raising a revenue in America quietly” was out of the ques¬
tion, it was decided to destroy their power to resist: the colonies
were to be “politically broken up.” And so the Tea Act was passed,
not to gain a revenue but to provoke a quarrel. The ministry
wished “to see America in arms . . . because it furnished them
with a pretense for declaring us rebels; and persons conquered
under that character forfeit their all, be it where it will or what
it will, to the crown.” England did not desire an accommodation of
any sort, Lord North’s conciliatory plan notwithstanding. “From
motives of political avarice,” she sought an excuse for conquest:
“it is on this ground only that the continued obstinacy of her
conduct can be accounted for.” 29
But perhaps the most explicit and detailed explanation of the
assault upon America by a conspiratorial ministry came from
the pen of a country parson in Connecticut writing “to enlighten
the people of a country town not under the best advantages for
information from the newspapers and other pieces wrote upon
the controversy.” Seeking to rouse the villagers “to a sense of the
danger to which their liberties are now involved,” the Rev. Ebe-
nezer Baldwin of Danbury explained that during the last war “the
^Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714-1830 (Oxford, 1964),
pp. 37-38, 51, 53-54, 147-148, 170, 291, 318-319; Noble, Some Strictures,
pp. 10, 17-18, 12. See also Richard Salter, A Sermon . . . (New London,
1768); Johnson, Some Important Observations, pp. 39, 55—56; Elisha Fish,
Joy and Gladness . . . (Providence, 1767).
20 Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (Philadelphia, 1776), p. 5.
228 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
state of the colonies was much more attended to than it had been
in times past,” and “a very exalted idea of the riches of this
country” had been conveyed back to England by the returning
officers and soldiers. This exciting information fitted the plans of
the ministry neatly, for
notwithstanding the excellency of the British constitution, if the min¬
istry can secure a majority in Parliament who will come into all their
measures [and] will vote as they bid them, they may rule as absolutely
as they do in France or Spain, yea as in Turkey or India. And this
seems to be the present plan: to secure a majority of Parliament,
and thus enslave the nation with their own consent. The more places
or pensions the ministry have in their gift the more easily they can
bribe a ^majority of Parliament by bestowing those places on them or
their friends. This makes them erect so many new and unnecessary
offices in America, even so as to swallow up the whole of the revenue
... by bestowing these places—places of considerable profit and no
labor—upon the children or friends or dependents of the members
of Parliament, the ministry can secure them in their interest. This
doubtless is the great thing the ministry are driving at, to establish
arbitrary government with the consent of Parliament. And to keep the
people of England still, the first exertions of this power are upon the
colonies.^
Thus the balance of the constitution had been thrown off by a
gluttonous ministry usurping the prerogatives of the crown and
systematically corrupting the independence of the Commons. Cor¬
ruption was at the heart of it—the political corruption built on
the general dissoluteness of the populace, so familiar in the his-
tory of tyranny and so shocking to observers of mid-eighteenth-
century England. The evil, public and private, that had appalled
Dickinson in 1754 had ripened, it seemed clear, in the subsequent
decade. As early as 1766 there had been nervous speculation in
the colonies about what would happen
if the British empire should have filled up the measure of its in¬
iquity and become ripe for ruin: ... if a proud, arbitrary, s elfish,
and venal spirit of corruption should ever reign in the British court
and diffuse itself through all ranks in the nation; if lucrative posts
be multiplied without necessity, and pensioners multiplied without
bounds; if the policy of governing be by bribery and corruption, and
the trade and manufactures of the nation be disregarded and tram¬
pled under foot; if all offices be bought and sold at a high and ex¬
travagant price ... and if, to support these shocking enormities and
corruptions, the subjects in all quarters must be hard squeezed with
me iron arms of oppression.
^Baldwin, Appendix , p. 51, 67-68.
BERNARD BAILYN 22p
Two years later it was stated that
The present involved state of the British nation, the rapacity and
profuseness of many of her great men, the prodigious number of
their dependents who want to be gratified with some office which may
enable them to live lazily upon the labor of others, must convince
us that we shall be taxed so long as we have a penny to pay, and
that new offices will be constituted and new officers palmed upon us
until the number is so great that we cannot by our constant labor
and toil maintain any more.
By 1769 a Boston correspondent of Wilkes commented on "that
torrent of corruption which like a general flood, has deluged alT to
the eternal disgrace of the British nation,” and suggested that the
reason the "arbitrary and despotic” English government had "ex¬
tended their ravages to America” was because they had found the
British Isles too restricted an area for the full gratification of
their "incessant cravings of luxury, extravagance and dissipa¬
tion.” 31
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by
political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most
informed colonists, evident; but if they had not realized it them¬
selves they would soon have discovered it from the flood of news¬
papers, pamphlets, and letters that poured in on them from radical
sources in England. Again and again reports from the home coun¬
try proclaimed that the English nation had departed, once and
for all and completely, from the true principles of liberty: the
principles not of "certain modem Whigs,” as one English pamphlet
of 1774, reprinted in the colonies seven times within the year of
its first appearance, explained, but of "Whigs before the [Glorious]
Revolution and at the time of it; I mean the principles which such
men as Mr. Locke, Lord Molesworth, and Mr. Trenchard main¬
tained with their pens, Mr. Hampden and Lord [William] Russell
with their blood, and Mr. Algernon Sidney with both.” To those
Englishmen who in the 1770’s most directly inherited and most
forcefully propagated these radical principles—Richard Price,
Joseph Priestley, James Burgh—the situation at home if not
abroad justified, even exaggerated, the worst fears for the future
of liberty that their predecessors had expressed. For these latter-
day radicals had witnessed personally the threatening rise of
ai Johnson, Some Important Observations, p. 20; Thomas Bradbury, The
Ass, or, the Serpent . . . (1712: reprinted in Boston, 1768), p. 12n; William
Palfrey to Wilkes, February 21 and April 12, 1769, Proceedings of the Massa¬
chusetts Historical Society, 47 (1913—1914), 197, 199.
2 3° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
prerogative influence in the English government and its dramatic
manifestation in the Wilkes affair; and they had seen revealed
the rapacity and bankruptcy of the swollen East India Company, a
revelation which illuminated to them the corruption of their era
as dramatically as the collapse of the South Sea Company had
revealed the rottenness of the era of George I to Trenchard and
Gordon. Everywhere there was cynicism and gluttonous self-seek¬
ing. What more was needed to convince one that affairs in Britain
were plummeting toward complete and irrecoverable collapse?
The long-awaited signs of the total degeneration of the moral
qualities necessary to preserve liberty were unmistakable, and these
English radicals said so, vigorously, convincingly, in a series of
increasingly shrill pamphlets and letters that were read avidly,
circulated, published and republished, in America, 32
There, these ideas carried conviction to a far larger part of the
population, and bore more dramatic implications than they did
in England. “Liberty," John Adams wrote, “can no more exist
without virtue and independence than the body can live and move
without a soul,” and what liberty can be expected to flow from
England where luxury, effeminacy, and venality axe arrived at
such a shocking pitch” and where “both electors and elected
are become one mass of corruption” ? It was not hard to see where
England stood: it was, Adams declared, precisely at the point
“where the Roman republic was when Jugurtha left it and pro¬
nounced it a venal city ripe for destruction, if it can only find a
purchaser.” The analogy to the decline and fall of Rome and its
empire was intriguing and informative; others carried it further
and became more specific. Like Rome in its decline, England,
from being the nursery of heroes, became the residence of musi-
cians, pimps, panders, and catamites.” The swift decline of her
empire, which, it was observed, had reached its peak only between
[Matthew Robinson-Morris, Lord Rokeby], Considerations on the Measures
Carrying on with Respect to the British Colonies in North America, 2d ed.
(London, 1774), p. 10. This pamphlet was reprinted three times in Boston,
twice m Philadelphia, and once in New York and Hartford in 1774 and
l l° r Ah }^ Adams’ awareness of the identity between Rokeby’s views
™ d ~?| e . of T he * h “ sban <i writing as “Novanglus,” see her letter of May
Tr- 1 l 7 ?J m et al, eds., Adams Family Correspondence
203n11 - See also [Joseph Priestley], An Address
to Protestant Dissenters (Boston, 1774), p. 6; this pamphlet, first published
m London m 1773, appeared in three American editions in 1774. And see,
5 )scar „ a ^, d Miu 7 F - Handlin, “James Burgh and American Revo-
lurionary Th^ry, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 73
“J olm Dickinson, Historical Revolution-
wft,’ 83 9o S9 v -^ 4; Caloline bobbins, The Eighteenth-Century
Commonwealthman (Cambridge, 1959), chap. lx.
BERNARD BAILYN 231
1758 and the Stamp Act, resulted from the same poison that had
proved so fatal to free states in classical antiquity: the corruption,
effeminacy, and languor that came from "the riches and luxuries
of the East” and led to a calamitous "decay of virtue” and the
collapse of the constitution. So often, so stridently, and so con¬
vincingly was it said in the colonies that in England ‘luxury has
arrived to a great pitch; and it is a universal maxim that luxury
indicates the declension of a state”—so often was it argued that
vigor was gone, exhaustion and poverty approaching, that those
who would defend British policy were obliged to debate the point:
to assert the health and strength of English society, arguing, as
Samuel Seabury did, that England was a "vigorous matron, just
approaching a green old age; and with spirit and strength suffi¬
cient to chastise her undutiful and rebellious children and not at
all, as his adversary Alexander Hamilton had pictured her, an
old, wrinkled, withered, worn-out hag.” 33
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had
risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colo¬
nists. It gave a radical new meaning to their claims: it transformed
them from constitutional arguments to expressions of a world re¬
generative creed. For they knew that England was one of the last
refuges of the ancient gothic constitution that had once flourished
everywhere in the civilized world. By far "the greatest part of the
human race,” it was known, already lies in "total subjection to
their rulers.” Throughout the whole continent of Asia people are
reduced "to such a degree of abusement and degradation
that the very idea of liberty is unknown among them. In Africa,
scarce any human beings axe to be found but barbarians, tyrants,
and slaves: all equally remote from the true dignity of human na¬
ture and from a well-regulated state of society. Nor is Europe free
from the curse. Most of her nations are forced to drink deep of the
bitter cup. And in those in which freedom seems to have been estab¬
lished, the vital flame is going out. Two kingdoms, those of Sweden
and Poland , have been betrayed and enslaved in the course of one
year. The free towns of Germany can remain free no longer than
their potent neighbors shall please to let them. Holland has got the
forms if she has lost the spirit of a free country. Switzerland alone
is in the full and safe possession of her freedom.
^Adams ( <<! Novanglus”), Novanglus and Massachusettensis, pp. 25, 22,
43; William Hooper of North Carolina, quoted in Charles F. Mullett "Classi¬
cal Influences on the American Revolution,” Classical Journal, 35 (1939
1940) 103; William H. Drayton, A Charge on the Rise of the American
Empire . . . (Charleston, 1776), pp. 2-3; Seabury, A View of the Contro¬
versy, in Vance, Letters of a Vfestchester Farmer, p. 140.
232 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
And if now, in this deepening gloom, the light of liberty went out
in Britain too in Britain, where next to “self-preservation, political
liberty is the main aim and end of her constitution”—if, as events
clearly portended and as “senators and historians are repeatedly
predicting . . . continued corruption and standing armies will
prove mortal distempers in her constitution”—what then? What
refuge will liberty find?
“To our own country,” it was answered, “must we look for the
biggest part of that liberty and freedom that yet remains, or is
to be expected, among mankind. ... For while the greatest part
of the nations of the earth are held together under the yoke of
universal slavery, the North American provinces yet remain the
country of freemen: the asylum, and the last, to which such may
yet flee from the common deluge.” More than that: “our native
country . . . bids the fairest of any to promote the perfection and
happiness of mankind.” No one, of course, can predict “the state
of mankind in future ages.” But insofar as one can judge the
ultimate designs of providence by the number and power of the
causes that are already at work, we shall be led to think that the
perfection and happiness of mankind is to be carried further
in America than it has ever yet been in any place.” Consider the
growth the colonies had enjoyed in so short a time—growth in
£ U J W u yS ’ ^ Ut es P eciaI1 y k 1 population: a great natural increase it
had been, supplemented by multitudes from Europe, “tired out
with the^ miseries they are doomed to at home,” migrating to
America “as the only country in which they can find food, raiment,
and rest.” Consider also the physical vigor of the people. But
above all consider the moral health of the people and of the body
politic. J
The fatal arts of luxury and corruption are but comparatively be¬
ginning among us . . Nor is corruption yet established as the common
principle in public affairs. Our representatives are not chosen by
bribing, corrupting, or buying the votes of the electors. Nor does it
take one half of the revenue of a province to manage her house of
commons ... We have been free also from the burden and danger of
standing armies ... Our defenses has been our militia ... the general
operation of things among ourselves indicate strong tendencies towards
seen atC ° f greater P erfection and happiness than mankind has yet
No one therefore can conceive of the cause of America as “the
thp S l° f a T b ’,fA Party ’ ° r a faction ” The cause of America “is
the cause of self-defense, of public faith, and of the liberties of
mankind. ... In our destruction, liberty itself expires, and human
BERNARD BAILYN 233
nature will despair of evermore regaining its first and original
dignity/ ” 34
This theme, elaborately orchestrated by the colonial writers,
marked the f ulfillm ent of the ancient idea, deeply embedded in
the colonists' awareness, that America had from the start been
destined to play a special role in history. The controversy with
England, from its beginning in the early 1760’s, had lent support
to that belief, so long nourished by so many different sources: the
covenant theories of the Puritans, certain strands of Enlighten¬
ment thought, the arguments of the English radicals, the condi¬
tion of life in the colonies, even the conquest of Canada. It had
been the Stamp Act that had led John Adams to see in the original
settlement of the colonies “the opening of a grand scene and
design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the
emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
And Jonathan Mayhew, celebrating the conclusion of the same
episode, had envisioned future streams of refugees escaping from
a Europe sunk in ‘luxury, debauchery, venality, intestine quarrels,
or other vices.” It was even possible, Mayhew had added, who
knows?” that “our liberties being thus established, ... on some
future occasion . . . we or our posterity may even have the great
felicity and honor to . . . keep Britain herself from ruin. 35
Now, in 1774, that “future occasion” was believed to be at hand.
After the passage of the Coercive Acts it could be said that all the
spirit of patriotism or of liberty now left in England was no more
than “the last snuff of an expiring lamp,” while “the same sacred
flame . . . which once showed forth such wonders in Greece and
in Rome . . . bums brightly and strongly in America.” Who ought
then to suppress as “whimsical and enthusiasticai the belief that
the colonies were to become “the foundation of a great and mighty
empire, the largest the world ever saw to be founded on such
principles of liberty and freedom, both civil and religious . - •
[and] which shall be the principal seat of that glorious kingdom
which Christ shall erect upon earth in the latter days”? It was the
hand of God that was “in America now giving a new epocha to
the history of the world.” 36
34 Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of out Country . . . (Salem,
1775), pp. 21, 22, 23, 25, 26. Cf., e.g., Thomas Coombe, A Sermon Preached
. (Philadelphia, 1775), pp. 19-20; [Richard Wells], A Few Political
Reflections . . . (Philadelphia, 1774), pp. 38-40, 50. _
^Adams, Dissertation , in Works , in, 452n; Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare
Broken . . . (Boston, 1766), pp. 36, 38. _ . . .
“Rokeby, Considerations, p. 148; Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing
under Calamities and Afflictions . . . (New York, 1776), p. 38.
234 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
In the invigorating atmosphere of such thoughts, the final
conclusion of the colonists" logic could be drawn not with regret
but with joy. For while everyone knew that when tyranny is abroad
"submission is a crime”; while they readily acknowledged that
"no obedience is due to arbitrary, unconstitutional edicts calcu¬
lated to enslave a free people”; and while they knew that the in¬
vasion of the liberties of the people "constitutes a state of war with
the people” who may properly use "all the power which God has
given them” to protect themselves—nevertheless they hesitated to
come to a final separation even after Lexington and Bunker Hill.
They hesitated, moving slowly and reluctantly, protesting "before
God and the world that the utmost of [our] wish is that things
may return to their old channel.” They hesitated because their
“sentiments of duty and affection” were sincere; they hesitated
because their respect for constituted authority was great; and
they hesitated too because their future as an independent people
was a matter of doubt, full of the fear of the unknown. 37
What would an independent American nation be? A republic,
necessarily—and properly, considering the character and circum¬
stances of the people. But history clearly taught that republics
were delicate polities, quickly degenerating into anarchy and
tyranny; it was impossible, some said, to "recollect a single in¬
stance of a nation who supported this form of government for any
length of time or with any degree of greatness.” Others felt that
independence might "split and divide the empire into a number
of petty, insignificant states” that would easily fall subject to the
will of "some foreign tyrant, or the more intolerable despotism of
a few American demogogues”; the colonies might end by being
"parceled out, Poland-like.”
But if what the faint-hearted called "the ill-shapen, diminutive
brat independency ” contained within it all that remained of free¬
dom; if it gave promise of growing great and strong and becoming
the protector and propagator of liberty everywhere; if it were in¬
deed true that "the cause of America is in a great measure the
cause of all mankind”; if " Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or
an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will
be more or less affected even to the end of time by our proceed¬
ings now”—if all of this were true, ways would be found by men
inspired by such prospects to solve the problems of a new society
^Johnson, Some Important Observations , pp. 21, 23; [Robert Carter
Nicholas], Considerations on the Present State of Virginia Examined ([Wil¬
liamsburg], 1774), in Earl G. Swem reprint (New York, 1919), pp. 68, 42.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 235
and government. And so let every lover of mankind, every hater
of tyranny,
stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression.
Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have
long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and Englan
hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and pre¬
pare in time an asylum for mankind . 38
j The Puritan Ethic and the
Coming of the American Revolution
EDMUND S. MORGAN
The American Revolution, we have been told, was radical and
conservative, a movement for home rule and a contest for rule
at home, the product of a rising nationality and the cause of that
nationality, the work of designing demagogues and a triumph of
statesmanship. John Adams said it took place in the minds and
hearts of the people before 1776; Benjamin Rush thought it had
scarcely begun in 1787. There were evidently many revolutions,
many contests, divisions, and developments that deserve to be con¬
sidered as part of the American Revolution. This paper deals in
a preliminary, exploratory way with an aspect of the subject that
has hitherto received little attention. 1 Without pretending to ex¬
plain the whole exciting variety of the Revolution, I should like
to suggest that the movement in all its phases, from the resistance
against Parliamentary taxation in the 1760’s to the establishment
of a national government and national policies in the 1790’s was
Reprinted with additions and permission from The William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXTV (January, 1967), 3-18. Copyright © 1967 by Ed¬
mund S. Morgan.
^Braxton, Address, p. 19; Seabury, View, in Vance, Letters of a West¬
chester Farmer, p. 112; Daniel Leonard (“Massachusettensis”), in Novanglus
and Massachusettensis, p. 185; [Joseph Galloway], A Candid Examination of
the Mutual Claims of Great-Britain and the Colonies . . . (New York, 1775),
p. 31; [Thomas Paine], Common Sense . . . (Philadelphia, 1776), in Mon¬
cure D. Conway, ed.. The Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1894-
1896), I, 68, 84-85, 100-101.
x The author is engaged in a full-scale study of this theme. The present
essay is interpretative, and citations have for the most part been limited to
identifying the sources of quotations.
236 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
affected, not to say guided, by a set of values inherited from the
age of Puritanism.
These values or ideas, which I will call collectively the Puritan
Ethic, 2 were not unconscious or subconscious, but were deliberately
and openly expressed by men of the time. The men who expressed
them were not Puritans, and few of the ideas included in the
Puritan Ethic were actually new. Many of them had existed in
other intellectual contexts before Puritanism was heard of, and
many of them continue to exist today, as they did in the Revolu¬
tionary period, without the support of Puritanism. But Puritanism
wove them together in a single rational pattern, and Puritans
planted the pattern in America. It may be instructive, therefore,
to identify the ideas as the Puritans defined and explained them
before going on to the way in which they were applied in Revolu¬
tionary America after they had emerged from the Puritan mesh.
The values, ideas, and attitudes of the Puritan Ethic, as the
term will be used here, clustered around the familiar idea of
“calling.” God, the Puritans believed, called every man to serve
Him by serving society and himself in some useful, productive
occupation. Before entering on a trade or profession, a man must
determine whether he had a calling to undertake it. If he had
talents for it, if it was useful to society, if it was appropriate to
his station in life, he could feel confident that God called him to it.
God called no one to a life of prayer or to a life of ease or to any
life that added nothing to the common good. It was a “foul dis¬
order in any Commonwealth that there should be suffered rogues,
beggars, vagabonds.” The life of a monk or nun was no calling
because prayer must be the daily exercise of every man, not a way
for particular men to make a living. And perhaps most import¬
ant, the life of the carefree aristocrat was no calling: “miserable
and damnable is the estate of those that being enriched with great
livings and revenues, do spend their days in eating and drinking,
in sports and pastimes, not employing themselves in service for
Church or Commonwealth.” 3
Once called to an occupation, a man’s duty to the Maker Who
called him demanded that he labor assiduously at it. He must
2 I have chosen this term rather than the familiar “Protestant Ethic” of
Max Weber, partly because I mean something slightly different and partly
because Weber confined his phrase to attitudes prevailing while the religious
impulse was paramount. The attitudes that survived the decline of religion
he designated as the ‘spirit of capitalism.” In this essay I have not attempted
to distinguish earlier from later, though I am concerned with a period when
the attitudes were no longer dictated primarily by religion.
3 William Perkins, Workes (London, 1626-1631), I, 755-756.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 237
shun both idleness, or neglect of his calling, and sloth, or slack¬
ness in it. Recreation was legitimate, because body and mind
sometimes needed a release in order to return to work with re¬
newed vigor. But recreation must not become an end in itself.
One of the Puritans’ objections to the stage was that professional
players made recreation an occupation and thereby robbed the
commonwealth of productive labor. The emphasis throughout was
on productivity for the benefit of society.
In addition to working diligently at productive tasks, a man
was supposed to be thrifty and frugal. It was good to produce but
bad to consume any more than necessity required. A man was
but the steward of the possessions he accumulated. If he indulged
himself in luxurious living, he would have that much less with
which to support church and society. If he needlessly consumed
bis substance, either from carelessness or from sensuality, he
failed to honor the God who furnished him with it.
In this atmosphere the tolerance accorded to merchants was
grudging. The merchant was suspect because he tended to en¬
courage unnecessary consumption and because he did not actually
produce anything; he simply moved things about. It was formally
recognized that making exchanges could be a useful service, but
it was a less essential one than that performed by the farmer, the
shoemaker, or the weaver. Moreover, the merchant sometimes de¬
meaned his calling by practicing it to the detriment rather than
the benefit of society: he took advantage of his position to collect
more than the value of his services, to charge what the market
would bear. In short, he sometimes engaged in what a later gen¬
eration would call speculation.
As the Puritan Ethic induced a suspicion of merchants, it also
induced, for different reasons, a suspicion of prosperity. Super¬
ficial readers of Max Weber have often leapt to the conclusion
that Puritans viewed economic success as a sign of salvation. In
fact, Puritans were always uncomfortable in the presence of
prosperity. Although they constantly sought it, although hard
work combined with frugality could scarcely fail in the New World
to bring it, the Puritans always felt more at ease when adversity
made them tighten their belts. They knew that they must be
thankful for prosperity, that like everything good in the world it
came from God. But they also knew that God could use it as a
temptation, that it could lead to idleness, sloth, and extravagance.
These were vices, not simply because they in turn led to poverty,
but because God forbade them. Adversity, on the other hand,
though a sign of God’s temporary displeasure, and therefore a
238 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
cause for worry, was also God’s means of recalling a people to
Him. When God showed anger man knew he must repent and do
something about it. In times of drought, disease, and disaster a
man could renew his faith by exercising frugality and industry,
which were good not simply because they would lead to a restora¬
tion of prosperity, but because God demanded them.
The ambivalence of this attitude toward prosperity and ad¬
versity was characteristic of the Puritans: it was their lot to be
forever improving the world, in full knowledge that every im¬
provement would in the end prove illusory. While rejoicing at the
superior purity of the churches they founded in New England,
they had to tell themselves that they had often enjoyed more
godliness while striving against heavy odds in England. The ex¬
perience caused Nathaniel Ward, the “simple cobbler of Agga-
wam,” to lament the declension that he was sure would overtake
the Puritans in England after they gained the upper hand in the
1640’s: “my heart hath mourned, and mine eyes wept in secret,
to consider what will become of multitudes of my dear Country¬
men [in England], when they shall enjoy what they now covet.” 4
Human flesh was too proud to stand success; it needed the disci¬
pline of adversity to keep it in line. And Puritans accordingly
relished every difficulty and worried over every success.
This thirst for adversity found expression in a special kind of
sermon, the Jeremiad, which was a lament for the loss of virtue
and a warning of divine displeasure and desolation to come. The
Jeremiad was a rhetorical substitute for adversity, designed to
stiffen the virtue of the prosperous and successful by assuring
them that they had failed. Nowhere was the Puritan Ethic more
assiduously inculcated than in these laments, and it accordingly
became a characteristic of the virtues which that ethic demanded
that they were always seen to be expiring, if not already dead.
Industry and frugality in their full vigor belonged always to an
earlier generation, which the existing one must learn to emulate
if it would avoid the wrath of God.
These ideas and attitudes were not peculiar to Puritans. The
voluminous critiques of the Weber thesis have shown that similar
attitudes prevailed widely among many groups and at many times.
But the Puritans did have them, and so did their descendants in
the time of the Revolution and indeed for long after it. It matters
little by what name we call them or where they came from. “The
4 Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America (London,
1647), 41.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 239
Puritan Ethic” is used here simply as an appropriate shorthand
phrase to designate them, and should not be taken to imply that
the American Revolutionists were Puritans.
The Puritan Ethic as it existed among the Revolutionary gener¬
ation had in fact lost for most men the endorsement of an omni¬
present angry God. The element of divinity had not entirely de¬
parted, but it was a good deal diluted. The values and precepts
derived from it, however, remained intact and were reinforced by
a reading of history that attributed the rise and fall of empires
to the acquisition and loss of the same virtues that God had de¬
manded of the founders of New England. Rome, it was learned,
had risen while its citizens worked at their callings and led lives of
simplicity and frugality. Success as usual had resulted in extrava¬
gance and luxury. “The ancient, regular, and laborious life was
relaxed and sunk in Idleness,” and the torrent of vices thus let
loose had overwhelmed the empire. In modem times the frugal
Dutch had overthrown the extravagant Spanish. 5 The lesson of
history carried the same imperatives that were intoned from the
pulpit.
Whether they derived their ideas from history thus interpreted
or from the Puritan tradition or elsewhere, Americans of the
Revolutionary period in every colony and state paid tribute to the
Puritan Ethic and repeated its injunctions. Although it was prob¬
ably strongest among Presbyterians and Congregationalists like
Benjamin Rush and Samuel Adams, it is evident enough among
Anglicans like Henry Laurens and Richard Henry Lee and even
among deists like Franklin and Jefferson. Jefferson’s letters to his
daughters sometimes sound as though they had been written by
Cotton Mather: “It is your future happiness which interests me,
and nothing can contribute more to it (moral rectitude always ex¬
cepted) than the contracting a habit of industry and activity. Of
all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so
silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence.” “Determine never to
be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of
time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done,
if we are always doing.” 6 And Jefferson of course followed his own
injunction: a more methodically industrious man never lived.
The Puritan Ethic whether enjoined by God, by history, or by
spurdie and Dixon's Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), Sept. 5, 1771. Cf.
Pennsylvania Chronicle (Philadelpbia), Feb. 9—16, May 4—11, 1767; New¬
port Mercury , Mar. 7, 1774; and Boston Evening Post , Nov. 30, 1767.
«To Martha Jefferson, Mar. 28, May 5, 1787, in JuHan Boyd et al., eds.,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, 1950-), XI, 250, 349.
240 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
philosophy, called for diligence in a productive calling, beneficial
both to society and to the individual. It encouraged frugality and
frowned on extravagance. It viewed the merchant with suspicion
and speculation with horror. It distrusted prosperity and gathered
strength from adversity. It prevailed widely among Americans of
different times and places, but those who urged it most vigorously
always believed it to be on the point of expiring and in need of
renewal.
The role of these ideas in the American Revolution—during the
period, say, roughly from 1764 to 1789—was not explicitly causa¬
tive. That is, the important events of the time can seldom be
seen as the result of these ideas and never as the result solely of
these ideas. Yet the major developments, the resistance to Great
Britain, independence, the divisions among the successful Revolu¬
tionists, and the formulation of policies for the new nation, were
all discussed and understood by men of the time in terms derived
from the Puritan Ethic. And the way men understood and defined
the issues before them frequendy influenced their decisions.
The Origins of American Independence
In the first phase of the American Revolution, the period of
agitation between the passage of the Sugar Act in 1764 and the
outbreak of hostilities at Lexington in 1775, Americans were pri¬
marily concerned with finding ways to prevent British authority
from infringing what they considered to be their rights. The
principal point of contention was Parliament’s attempt to tax
them; and their efforts to prevent taxation, short of outright
resistance, took two forms: economic pressure through boycotts
and political pressure through the assertion of political and con¬
stitutional principles. Neither form of protest required the appli¬
cation of the Puritan Ethic, but both in the end were affected by it.
The boycott movements were a means of getting British mer¬
chants to bring their weight to bear on Parliament for the; specific
purpose of repealing tax laws. In each case the boycotts began
with extralegal voluntary agreements among citizens not to con¬
sume British goods. In 1764-1765, for instance, artisans agreed
to wear only leather working clothes. Students forbore imported
beer. Fore companies pledged themselves to eat no mutton in order
to increase the supply of local wool. Backed by the nonconsumers,
merchants of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston agreed to im¬
port no British goods until the repeal of the Stamp Act. The pres-
EDMUND S. MORGAN 24 I
sure had the desired effect: The Stamp Act was repealed and the
Sugar Act revised. When the Townshend Acts and later the Coer¬
cive Acts were passed, new nonconsumption and nonimportation
agreements were launched. 7
From the outset these colonial boycott movements were more
than a means of bringing pressure on Parliament. That is to say,
they were not simply negative in intent. They were also a positive
end in themselves, a way of reaffirming and rehabilitating the
virtues of the Puritan Ethic. Parliamentary taxation offered Amer¬
icans the prospect of poverty and adversity, and, as of old, ad¬
versity provided a spur to virtue. In 1764, when Richard Henry
Lee got news of the Sugar Act, he wrote to a friend in London:
“Possibly this step of the mother country, though intended to
oppress and keep us low, in order to secure our dependence, may
be subversive of this end. Poverty and oppression, among those
whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty, may intro¬
duce a virtuous industry, with a train of generous and manly sen¬
timents. . . .” 8 And so it proved in the years that followed: as their
Puritan forefathers had met providential disasters with a renewal
of the virtue that would restore God's favor, the Revolutionary
generation met taxation with a self-denial and industry that would
hopefully restore their accustomed freedom and simultaneously
enable them to identify with their virtuous ancestors.
The advocates of nonconsumption and nonimportation, in
urging austerity on their countrymen, made very little of the
effect that self-denial would have on the British government. Non¬
importation and nonconsumption were preached as means of
renewing ancestral virtues. Americans were reminded that they
had been “of late years insensibly drawn into too great a degree
of luxury and dissipation ” 9 Parliamentary taxation was a blessing
in disguise, because it produced the nonimportation and non¬
consumption agreements. “Luxury,” the people of the colonies
were told, ‘has taken deep root among us, and to cure a people
of luxury were an Herculean task indeed; what perhaps no power
on earth but a British Parliament, in the very method they are
taking with us, could possibly execute.” 10 Parliamentary taxation.
7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolu¬
tion , 1763-1776 (New York, 1918), remains the best account of these
movements.
8 To [Unknown], May 31, 1764, in James C. Ballagh, ed.. The Letters of
Richard Henry Lee (New York, 1911), I, 7.
^Boston Evening Post, November 16, 1767.
10 Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), June 1, 1769 (reprinted from New
York Chronicle ).
242 REINTERPHETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
like an Indian attack in earlier years, was thus both a danger to
be resisted and an act of providence to recall Americans from
declension: The Americans have plentifully enjoyed the delights
and comforts, as well as the necessaries of life, and it is well
known that an increase of wealth and affluence paves the way to
an increase of luxury, immorality and profaneness, and here
kind providence interposes; and as it were, obliges them to for¬
sake the use of one of their delights, to preserve their liberty.” 11
The principal object of this last homily was tea, which, upon being
subjected to a Parliamentary duty, became luxurious and enervat-
ing. Physicians even discovered that it was bad for the health. 12
Importations, it now appeared, were mainly luxuries, “Baubles of
Britain ” “foreign trifles.” 13
In these appeals for self-denial, the Puritan Ethic acquired a
value that had been only loosely associated with it hitherto: it
became an essential condition of political liberty. Americans like
Englishmen had long associated liberty with property. They now
concluded that both rested on virtue. An author who signed him¬
self “Frugality advised the readers of the Newport Mercury that
“We may talk and boast of liberty; but after all, the industrious
and frugal only will be free,” 14 free not merely because their self-
denial would secure repeal of Parliamentary taxes, but because
freedom was inseparable from virtue, and frugality and industry
wer ® the most conspicuous public virtues. Bostonians were told
that “by consuming less of what we are not really in want of, and
by industriously cultivating and improving the natural advantages
of our own country, we might save our substance, even our lands
from becoming the property of others, and we might effectually
preserve our virtue and our liberty, to the latest posterity.” Liberty,
wrtue, and property offered a powerful rallying call to Americans.
Each supported the others; but virtue was the sine qua non of
the trio, for while liberty would expire without the support of
property, property itself could not exist without industry and
frugality. Expounding this point, the Pennsylvania Journal as¬
sured its readers that “Our enemies very well know that dominion
and property are closely connected; and that to impoverish us, is
the surest way to enslave us. Therefore, if we mean still to be
lx Newport Mercury , December 13, 1773.
“Ibid., November 9, 1767, November 29, 1773, February 14 28 1774
1771° S ^ n ^ EV l ni r 9 l ?St> N S V6 ™ er 9 ’ 16 ’ 1767 >* To Artite Lee, October^!
1904^-1908) n, 267 S ’ ^ " Writinas ° f Samuel Yarns’(New York,
“February 28, 1774.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 243
free, let us unanimously lay aside foreign superfluities, and en¬
courage our own manufacture, save your money and you will
SAVE YOUR COUNTRY!” 15
There was one class of Americans who could take no comfort in
this motto. The merchants, on whom nonimportation depended,
stood to lose by the campaign for austerity, and it is not surprising
that they showed less enthusiasm for it than the rest of the pop¬
ulation. Their lukewarmness only served to heighten the suspicion
with which their calling was still viewed. “Merchants have no
country,” Jefferson once remarked. “The mere spot they stand on
does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which
they draw their gains.” 16 And John Adams at the Continental
Congress was warned by his wife’s uncle that merchants have
no Object but their own particular Interest and they must be
Contrould or they will ruin any State under Heaven.” 17
Such attitudes had been nourished by the merchants behavior
in the 1760’s and 1770’s. After repeal of the Sjtamp Act, Silas
Downer, secretary of the Sons of Liberty in Providence, Rhode
Island, wrote to the New York Sons of Liberty that "From many
observations when the Stamp Act was new, I found that the Mer¬
chants in general would have quietly submitted, and many were
zealous for it, always reciting the Difficulties their Trade would
be cast into on Non Compliance, and never regarding the Interest
of the whole Community . . .” 18 When the Townshend Acts were
passed, it was not the merchants but the Boston town meeting
that took the lead in promoting nonimportation, and after the
repeal of the Acts the merchants broke down and began importing
while the duty on tea still remained. Samuel Adams had expected
their defection to come much sooner for he recognized that the
nonimportation agreements had “pressed hard upon their private
Interest” while the majority of consumers could participate under
the “happy Consideration that while they are most effectually serv¬
ing their Country they are adding to their private fortunes. 19
The merchants actually had more than a short-range interest at
15 Boston Evening Post , November 16, 1767; Pennsylvania Journal (Phila¬
delphia), December 10, 1767.
“To Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1817, quoted in Boyd, ed., Jefferson
Papers, XTV, 221.
17 Cotton Tufts to John Adams, April 26, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield et al .,
eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass., 1963—), I, 395.
“Letter dated July 21, 1766, Peck Manuscripts, III, 3, Rhode Island His¬
torical Society, Providence. .
“To Stephen Sayre, November 16, 1770, in Cushing, ed., Writings of
Samuel Adams , II, 58.
244 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
stake in their reluctance to undertake nonimportation. The move¬
ment, as we have seen, was not simply a means of securing repeal
of the taxes to which merchants along with other colonists were
opposed. The movement was in fact anticommercial, a repudiation
of the merchant's calling. Merchants, it was said, encouraged men
to go into debt. Merchants pandered to luxury. Since they made
more on the sale of superfluous baubles than on necessities, they
therefore pressed the sale of them to a weak and gullible public.
What the advocates of nonimportation demanded was not merely
an interruption of commerce but a permanent reduction, not to
say elimination, of it. In its place they called for manufacturing,
a palpably productive, useful calling.
The encouragement of manufacturing was an accompaniment
to all the nonimportation, nonconsumption movements. New York¬
ers organized a society specifically for that purpose, which offered
bounties for the production of native textiles and other necessaries.
The nonconsumption of mutton provided new supplies of wool,
which housewives turned into thread in spinning matches (wheel¬
wrights did a land-office business in spinning wheels). Stores
began selling American cloth, and college students appeared at
commencement in homespun. Tories ridiculed these efforts, and
the total production was doubtless small, but it would be difficult
to underestimate the importance' of the attitude toward manu¬
facturing that originated at this time. In a letter of Abigail Adams
can be seen the way in which the Puritan Ethic was creating out
of a Revolutionary protest movement the conception of a self-
sufficient American economy. Abigail was writing to her husband,
who was at the First Continental Congress, helping to frame the
Continental Association for nonimportation, nonexportation, and
nonconsumption:
If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should
return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners, and
not sink into inglorious ease. We have too many high sounding words,
and too few actions that correspond with them. I have spent one
Sabbeth in Town since you left me. I saw no difference in respect to
ornaments, etc. etc. but in the Country you must look for that virtue,
of which you find but small Glimerings in the Metropolis. Indeed they
have not the advantages, nor the resolution to encourage their own
Manufactories which people in the country have. To the Mercantile
part, tis considered as throwing away their own Bread; but they must
retrench their expenses and be content with a small share of gain
for they will find but few who will wear their Livery. As for me I will
EDMUND S. MORGAN 245
seek wool and flax and work willingly with my Hands, and indeed
there is occasion for all our industry and economy. 20
in 1774 manufacture retained its primitive meaning of some¬
thing made by hand, and making things by hand seemed a fitting
occupation for frugal country people who had always exhibited
more of the Puritan Ethic than high-living city folk. Abigail's
espousal of manufactures, with its defiant rejection of dependence
on the merchants of the city, marks a step away from the tradi¬
tional notion that America because of its empty lands and scarcity
of people was unsuited to manufactures and must therefore ob¬
tain them from the Old World. Through the nonimportation move¬
ments the colonists discovered that manufacturing was a calling
not beyond the capacities of a frugal, industrious people, however
few in number, and that importation of British manufactures
actually menaced frugality and industry. The result of the dis¬
covery was to make a connection with Britain seem neither wholly
necessary nor wholly desirable, so that when the thought of in¬
dependence at last came, it was greeted with less apprehension
that it might otherwise have been.
Nonimportation had produced in effect a trial run in economic
self-sufficiency. The trial was inconclusive as a demonstration of
American economic capacity, but it carried immense significance
intellectually, for it obliged the colonists to think about the possi¬
bility of an economy that would not be colonial. At the same time
it confirmed them in the notion that liberty was the companion
not only of property but of frugality and industry, two virtues that
in turn fostered manufactures. By invoking the Puritan Ethic on
behalf of a protest movement Americans had led themselves into
affirmations of value in which can be seen the glimmerings of a
future national economic policy.
While engaged in their campaign of patriotic frugality, Amer¬
icans were also articulating the political principles that they
thought should govern free countries and that should bar Parlia¬
ment from taxing them. The front line of defense against Parlia¬
ment was the ancient maxim that a man could not be taxed ex¬
cept by his own consent given in person or by his representative.
The colonists believed this to be an acknowledged principle of free
government, indelibly stamped on the British Constitution, and
20 October 16, 1774, in Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence , I,
173.
246 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
they wrote hundreds of pages affirming it. In those pages the
Puritan Ethic was revealed at the very root of the constitutional
principle when taxation without representation was condemned
as an assault on every man's calling. To tax a man without his
consent, Samuel Adams said, was “against the plain and obvious
rule of equity, whereby the industrious man is intitled to the fruits
of his industry/’ 21 And the New York Assembly referred to the
Puritan Ethic when it told Parliament that the effect of the sugar
and stamp taxes would be to “dispirit the People, abate their In¬
dustry, discourage Trade, introduce Discord, Poverty, and Slav¬
ery/' 22 Slavery, of course, meant no liberty and no property; and
without these, men had no motive for frugality and industry. In
other words, the New York protest was pointing out that uncon¬
trolled Parliamentary taxation, like luxury and extravagance, was
an attack not merely on property but on industry and frugality,
for which liberty and property must be the expected rewards. With
every protest that British taxation was reducing them to slavery,
Americans reaffirmed their devotion to industry and frugality and
their readiness to defy the British threat to them. Students of
the American Revolution have often found it difficult to believe
that the colonists were willing to fight about an abstract principle
and have sometimes dismissed the constitutional arguments of
the time as mere rhetoric. But the constitutional principle on
which the colonists rested their case was not the product either of
abstract political philosophy or of the needs of the moment. In
the colonists' view, the principle of no taxation without represen¬
tation was a means, hallowed by history, of protecting property
and of maintaining those virtues, associated with property, with¬
out which no people could be free. Through the rhetoric, if it may
be called that, of the Puritan Ethic, the colonists reached behind
the constitutional principle to the enduring human needs that
had brought the principle into being.
We may perhaps understand better the urgency both of the con¬
stitutional argument and of the drive toward independence that
it ultimately generated, if we observe the growing suspicion
among the colonists that the British government had betrayed its
own constitution and the values which that constitution protected.
In an earlier generation the colonists had vied with one another
^[Boston Gazette, December 19, 1768] in Cushing, ed.. Writings of Samuel
Adams, I, 271.
22 E. S. Morgan, ed., Prologue to Revolution .* Sources and Documents on the
Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1776 (Chapel Hill, 1959), 13.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 247
in praising the government of England. Englishmen, they believed,
had suffered again and again from invasion and tyranny, had
each time recovered control of their government, and in the
course of centuries had developed unparalleled constitutional safe¬
guards to keep rulers true to their callings. The calling of a ruler,
as the colonists and their Puritan forbears saw it, was like any
other calling: it must serve the common good; it must be useful,
productive; and it must be assiduously pursued. After the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, Englishmen had fashioned what seemed a
nearly perfect instrument of government, a constitution that
blended monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a mixture de¬
signed to avoid the defects and secure the benefits of each. But
something had gone wrong. The human capacity for corruption
had transformed the balanced government of King, Lords, and
Commons into a single-minded body of rulers bent on their own
enrichment and heedless of the public good.
A principal means of corruption had been the multiplication
of office-holders who served no useful purpose but fattened on
the labors of those who did the country's work. Even before the
dispute over taxation began, few colonists who undertook trips to
England failed to make unflattering comparisons between the
simplicity, frugality, and industry that prevailed in the colonies
and the extravagance, luxury, idleness, drunkenness, poverty, and
crime that they saw in the mother country. To Americans bred
on the values of the Puritan Ethic, England seemed to have fallen
prey to her own opulence, and the government shared heavily in
the corruption. In England, the most powerful country in the
world, the visitors found the people laboring under a heavy load
of taxes, levied by a government that swarmed with functionless
placeholders and pensioners. The cost of government in the col¬
onies, as Professor Gipson has shown, was vastly lower than in
England, with the per capita burden of taxation only a fraction of
that which Englishmen bore. 23 And whatever the costs of main¬
taining the empire may have contributed to the British burden,
it was clear that the English taxpayers supported a large band
of men who lived well from offices that existed only to pay their
holders. Even an American like George Croghan, who journeyed
to London to promote dubious speculative schemes of his own, felt
uncomfortable in the presence of English corruption: "I am Nott
S3 L. H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution . . .
(New York, 1936-), X, 53-110; Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution
1763-1775 (New York, 1954), 116-161.
248 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Sorry I came hear,” he wrote, "as it will Lam Me to be Contented
on a Litle farm in amerrica. ... I am Sick of London and heartily
Tierd of the pride and pompe. . . .” 24
In the 1760’s Americans were given the opportunity to gain the
perspective of a Croghan without the need for a trip abroad. The
Townshend Acts called for a reorganization of the customs serv¬
ice with a new set of higher officials, who would perforce be paid
out of the duties they extracted from the colonists. In the estab¬
lishment of this American Board of Customs Commissioners,
Americans saw the extension of England’s corrupt system of
officeholding to America. As Professor Dickerson has shown, the
Commissioners were indeed corrupt. 25 They engaged in extensive
"customs racketeering” and they were involved in many of the
episodes that heightened the tension between England and the
colonies: it was on their request that troops were sent to Boston;
the Boston Massacre took place before their headquarters; the
Gaspee was operating under their orders. But it was not merely
the official actions of the Commissioners that offended Americans.
Their very existence seemed to pose a threat both to the Puritan
Ethic and to the conscientious, frugal kind of government that
went with it. Hitherto colonial government had been relatively
free of the evils that had overtaken England. But now the horde
of placeholders was descending on America.
From the time the Commissioners arrived in Boston in Novem¬
ber 1767, the newspapers were filled with complaints that "there
can be no such thing as common good or common cause where
mens estates are ravaged at pleasure to lavish on parasitical
minions.” 26 Samuel Adams remarked that the commissioners were
"a useless and very expensive set of officers” and that they had
power to appoint "as many officers under them as they please,
for whose Support it is said they may sink the whole revenue.” 27
American writers protested against the ‘legions of idle, lazy, and
to say no worse, altogether useless customs house locusts, catter-
pillars, flies and lice.” 28 They were "a parcel of dependant tools
of arbitrary power, sent hither to enrich themselves and their
Masters, on the Spoil of the honest and industrious of these
^Quoted in T. P. Ab erne thy, Western Lands and the American Revolution
(New York, 1937), 24.
25 O. M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution
(Philadelphia, 1951), 208-265.
28 Boston Evening Post, November 30, 1767.
^To Dennys De Berdt, May 14, 1768, in Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel
Adams , I, 216.
28 Newport Mercury, June 21, 1773.
EDMUND S. MORGAN 249
colonies.” 29 By 1774, when the debate between colonies and Parlia¬
ment was moving into its final stages, town meetings could state
it as an intolerable grievance "that so many unnecessary officers
are supported by the earnings of honest industry, in a life of
dissipation and ease; who, by being properly employed, might be
useful members of society.” 30
The coming of the Customs Commissioners showed the colonists
that the ocean barrier which had hitherto isolated them from the
corruption of Britain was no longer adequate. Eventually, perhaps,
En glishmen would again arise, turn out the scoundrels, and recall
their government to its proper tasks. And Americans did not fail
to support Englishmen like John Wilkes whom they thought to
be working toward this end. But meanwhile they could not ignore
the dangers on their own shores. There would henceforth be in
their midst a growing enclave of men whose lives and values
denied the Puritan Ethic; and there would be an increasing num¬
ber of lucrative offices to tempt Americans to desert ancestral
standards and join the ranks of the "parasitical minions.” No
American was sure that his countrymen would be able to resist
the temptation. In 1766, after repeal of the Stamp Act, George
Mason had advised the merchants of London that Americans were
"not yet debauched by wealth, luxury, venality and corruption.” 31
But who could say how long their virtue would withstand the
closer subjection to British control that Whitehall seemed to be
designing? Some Americans believed that the British were de¬
liberately attempting to undermine the Puritan Ethic. In Boston
Samuel Adams observed in 1771 that "the Conspirators against
our Liberties are employing all their Influence to divide the
people, . . . introducing Levity Luxury and Indolence and assuring
them that if they are quiet the Ministry will alter their Meas¬
ures.” 32 And in 1772 Henry Marchant, a Rhode Island traveler in
England wrote to his friend Ezra Stiles: "You will often hear the
following Language—Damn those Fellows we shall never do any
Thing with Them till we root out that cursed puritanick Spirit-
How is this to be done?—keep Soldiers amongst Them, not so
much to awe Them, as to debauch their Morals—Toss off to them
all the Toies and Baubles that genius can invent to weaken their
Minds, fill Them with Pride and Vanity, and beget in them all
*>Ibid., July 13, 1772.
^Resolves of Bristol, R. I., ibid., March 21, 1774.
^Morgan, Prologue to Revolution , 160.
32To Arthur Lee, October 31, 1771, in Cushing, ed.. Writings of Samuel
Adams, II, 266-267.
250 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
possible Extravagance in Dress and Living, that They may be
kept poor and made wretched. . . ,” 33
By the time the First Continental Congress came together in
1774, large numbers of leading Americans had come to identify
Great Britain with vice and America with virtue, yet with the
fearful recognition that virtue stands in perennial danger from
the onslaughts of vice. Patrick Henry gave voice to the feeling
when he denounced Galloway’s plan for an intercolonial Ameri¬
can legislature that would stand between the colonies and Parlia¬
ment. “We shall liberate our Constituents,” he warned, "from
a corrupt House of Commons, but thro[w] them into the Arms
of an American Legislature that may be bribed by that Nation
which avows in the Face of the World, that Bribery is a Part of
her System of Government.” 34 A government that had succeeded
in taxing seven million Englishmen (with the consent of their
su PP ose( l representatives), to support an army of placeholders,
would have no hesitation in using every means to corrupt the
representatives of two and one half million Americans.
When the Second Congress met in 1775, Benjamin Franklin,
fresh from London, could assure the members that their contrast
of England and America was justified. Writing back to Joseph
Priestley, he said it would "scarce be credited in Britain, that men
can be as diligent with us from zeal for the public good, as
with you for thousands per annum. Such is the difference between
uncorrupted new states, and corrupted old ones.” 35 Thomas Jeffer¬
son drew the contrast even more bluntly in an answer rejecting
Lord North’s Conciliatory Proposal of February 20, 1775, which
had suggested that Parliament could make provisions for the
government of the colonies. ‘The provisions we have made,” said
Jefferson, "are such as please our selves, and are agreeable to
our own circumstances; they answer the substantial purposes of
government and of justice, and other purposes than these should
not be answered. We do not mean that our people shall be
burthened with oppressive taxes to provide sinecures for the idle
or the wicked. . . ,” 36
When Congress finally dissolved the political bands that had
connected America with England, the act was rendered less
^Quoted in E. S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-
1795 (New Haven, 1962), 265.
September 28, 1774, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds.. Diary and Auto¬
biography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), II, 143.
^July 6, 1775, in E. C. Burnett, ed.. Letters of Members of The Continental
Congress , Washington, 1921-1936), I, 156.
36 July 31, 1775, in Boyd, ed., Jefferson Papers , I, 232.
PERRY MILRER 25I
painful by the colonial conviction that America and England
were already separated as virtue is from vice. The British Con¬
stitution had foundered, and the British government had fallen
into the hands of a luxurious and corrupt ruling class. There
remained no way of preserving American virtue unless the con¬
nection with Britain was severed. The meaning of virtue in this
context embraced somewhat more than the values of the Puritan
Ethic, but those values were pre-eminent in it. In the eyes of
many Americans the Revolution was a defense of industry and
frugality, whether in rulers or people, from the assaults of British
vice. It is unnecessary to assess the weight of the Puritan Ethic
among the many revolutionary factors that scholars argue about.
It is enough simply to recognize that the Puritan Ethic prepared
the colonists both in their political and in their economic thinking
to embrace the idea of independence.
The Moral and Psychological Roots
of American Resistance
PERRY MILLER
1
On June 12, 1775, the Continental Congress dispatched from
Philadelphia to the thirteen colonies (and to insure a hearing,
ordered the document to be published in newspapers and in hand¬
bills) a “recommendation” that July 20 be universally observed
as “a day of publick humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” The Con¬
gress prefaced the request with a statement of reasons. Because
the great “Governor” not only conducts by His Providence the
course of nations “but frequently influences the minds of men
to serve the wise and gracious purposes of his providential gov¬
ernment,” and also it being our duty to acknowledge his super¬
intendency, “especially in time of impending danger and publick
calamity”—therefore the Congress acts.
Reprinted with permission from ‘Trom the Covenant to the Revival,” in
James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., The Shaping of American
Religion (Princeton, 1961), I, 322-350. Copyright © 1961 by Princeton Uni¬
versity Press.
252 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
What may elude the secular historian—what in fact has eluded
him—is the mechanism by which the Congress proposed that the
operation be conducted:
. . . that we may with united hearts and voices unfeignedly confess
and deplore our many sins, and offer up our joint supplications to
the all-wise, omnipotent, and merciful Disposer of all events; humbly
beseeching him to forgive our iniquities, to remove our present calami¬
ties, to avert those desolating judgments with which we are threat¬
ened. . . .
The essential point is that the Congress asks for, first, a national
confession of sin and iniquity, then a promise of repentance, that
only thereafter may God be moved so to influence Britain as to
allow America to behold "a gracious interposition of Heaven for
the redress of her many grievances/' 1 The subtle emphasis can be
detected once it is compared with the formula used by the Vir¬
ginia House of Burgesses in the previous month, on May 14:
". . . devoutly to implore the Divine interposition for averting the
heavy calamity which threatens destruction to our civil rights, and
the evils of civil war, to give us one heart and one mind firmly to
oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American
rights. . . ”
Jefferson testifies that in Virginia this measure was efficacious.
The people met with alarm in their countenances, "and the effect
of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity,
arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his
centre/' 2 However gratifying the local results might be, it should
be noted that this predominantly Anglican House of Burgesses,
confronted with calamity, made no preliminary detour through
any confession of their iniquities, but went directly to the throne
of God, urging that He enlist on their side. The Virginia delegation
in Philadelphia (which, let us remember, included Patrick Henry
but not Jefferson) concurred in the unanimous adoption of the
Congress's much more complicated—some were to say more de¬
vious—ritualistic project. Was this merely a diplomatic conces¬
sion? Or could it be that, once the threatened calamity was con¬
fronted on a national scale, the assembled representatives of
all the peoples instinctively realized that some deeper, some more
atavistic, search of their own souls was indeed the indispensable
prologue to exertion?
1 B. F, Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the
United States , Philadelphia, 1864, p. 525.
z Ibid., pp. 526-527.
PERRY MILLER 253
The question is eminently worth asking, if only because con¬
scientious historians have seen no difference between the two
patterns, and have assumed that the Congressional followed the
Virginian. 3 And there are other historians, who may or may not be
cynical, but who have in either case been corrupted by the twenti¬
eth century, who perceive in this and subsequent summonses to
national repentance only a clever device in "propaganda.” 4 It
was bound, they point out, to cut across class and regional lines,
to unite a predominantly Protestant people; wherefore the ration¬
alist or deistical leaders could hold their tongues and silently
acquiesce in the stratagem, calculating its pragmatic worth. In
this view, the fact that virtually all the "dissenting” clergy, and
a fair number of Anglicans, mounted their pulpits on July 20 and
preached patriotic self-abnegation, is offered as a proof that they
had joined with the upper middle-class in a scheme to bamboozle
the lower orders and simple-minded rustics.
This interpretation attributes, in short, a diabolical cunning to
the more sophisticated leaders of the Revolution, who, being them¬
selves no believers in divine providence, fastened onto the form
of invocation which would most work upon a majority who did
believe passionately in it. This reading may, I suggest, be as much
a commentary on the mentality of modem sociology as upon the
Continental Congress, but there is a further observation that has
been more cogently made by a few who have noted the striking
differences in phraseology: the Congressional version is substan¬
tially the form that for a century and a half had been employed
in New England. There, since the first years of Plymouth and the
first decade of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, the official
response in the face of affliction had been to set aside a day for
public confession of transgression and a promise of communal
repentance as the only method for beseeching the favor of
Jehovah. 5 Hence some analysts surmise that the action of the
Congress, if it was not quite a Machiavellian ruse for hood-wink¬
ing the pious, was at best a Yankee trick foisted on Virginia and
New York. Leaving aside the question of whether, should this
explanation be true, it might just as well have been a Virginian
fraud, one which cost Patrick Henry and Peyton Randolph nothing,
perpetrated to keep the New Englanders active, the simple fact
3 Cf., for instance, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence , New
York, 1958, pp. 31-32.
^Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1941, passim.
5 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province , Cam¬
bridge, Mass., 1953, pp. 19-26.
254 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
is that unprejudiced examination of the records of 1775 and
1776 shows that New England enjoyed no monopoly on the pro¬
cedure. The House of Burgesses might suppose it enough to peti¬
tion Almighty God to redress their wrongs; the churches of the
dissenters, and indeed most Anglican communities already knew,
whether in Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut, that this was
not the proper way to go about obtaining heavenly assistance. The
Biblical conception of a people standing in direct daily relation
to God, upon covenanted terms and therefore responsible for their
moral conduct, was a common possession of the Protestant peo¬
ples.
However, there can be no doubt that New England had done
much more than the other regions toward articulating colonial
experience within the providential dialectic. Because, also, presses
were more efficient there than elsewhere, and Boston imprints
circulated down the coast, it is probable that the classic utterances
of Massachusetts served as models for Presbyterians and Baptists
as well as for ‘low-church” Anglicans. For many decades the
Puritan colonies had been geographically set apart; the people
had been thoroughly accustomed to conceiving of themselves as
a chosen race, entered into specific covenant with God, by the
terms of which they would be proportionately punished for their
sins. Their afflictions were divine appointments, not the hazards
of natural and impersonal forces. 6 Furthermore, the homogeneity
of the Puritan communities enabled their parsons to speak in the
name of the whole body—even when these were internally riven
by strife over land banks, the Great Awakening, or baptism.
Finally, this same isolation of the New England colonies encour¬
aged a proliferation of the “federal theology” to a point where the
individual s relation with God, his hope of salvation through a
personal covenant, could be explicitly merged with the society’s
covenant. Hence in New England was most highly elaborated the
theorem that the sins of individuals brought calamity upon the
commonwealth.
In that sense, then, we may say that the Congressional recom¬
mendation of June 12, 1775, virtually took over the New England
thesis that these colonial peoples stood in a contractual relation
to the great Governor” over and above that enjoyed by other
groups; in effect, Congress added the other nine colonies (about
whose status New Englanders had hitherto been dubious) to New
a ? e£J 5!L .The New England Mind; The Seventeenth Century , New
ark, 1954, pp. 464-484.
PERRY MILLER 255
England's covenant. Still, for most of the population in these nine,
no novelty was being imposed. The federal theology, in general
terms, was an integral part of the Westminster Confession and
so had long figured in the rhetoric of Presbyterians of New
Jersey and Pennsylvania. The covenant doctrine, including that
of the society as well as of the individual, had been preached in
the founding of Virginia, 7 and still informed the phraseology of
ordinary Anglican sermonizing. The Baptists, even into Georgia,
were aware of the concept of church covenant, for theirs were
essentially "congregational" polities; they could easily rise from
that philosophy to the analogous one of the state. Therefore the
people had little difficulty reacting to the Congressional appeal.
They knew precisely what to do: they were to gather in their
assemblies on July 20, inform themselves that the afflictions
brought upon them in the dispute with Great Britain were not
hardships suffered in some irrational political strife but intelligible
ordeals divinely brought about because of their own abominations.
This being the situation, they were to resolve, not only separately
but in unison, to mend their ways, restore primitive piety, sup¬
press vice, curtail luxury. Then, and only thereafter, if they were
sincere, if they proved that they meant their vow, God would
reward them by raising up instruments for the deflection of,
or if necessary, destruction of, Lord North.
Since the New Englanders were such old hands at this business
—by exactly this method they had been overcoming, from the
days of the Pequot War through King Philip's War, such difficulties
as the tyranny of Andros, small-pox epidemics, and parching
droughts—they went to work at once. For the clergy the task was
already clear: beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765, the clerical
orator who spoke at every election day, in May, conveyed the
respects in which relations with England should be subsumed
under the over-all covenant of the people with God. Charles
Chauncy's A Discourse on the good News from a far Country,
delivered upon a day of "thanksgiving" (the logical sequel to
several previous days of humiliation) to the General Court in
1766, explained that repeal of the odious Stamp Act was a conse¬
quence not of any mercantile resistance but of New England's
special position within the Covenant of Grace. 8 As the crisis in
Boston grew more and more acute, successive election orators
TPerry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness , Cambridge, Mass., 1956, pp.
119-122.
8 John Wingate Thornton, The Pulpit of the American Revolution, Boston,
1860, pp. 105 ff.
256 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
had an annual opportunity to develop in greater detail proof that
any vindication of provincial privileges was inextricably depend¬
ent upon a moral renovation. Following the “Boston Massacre”
of 1770, anniversaries of this atrocity furnished every preacher
an occasion for spreading the idea among the people. The form
of these discourses was still that of the traditional “jeremiad”—
a threatening of further visitation upon the covenanted people
until they returned to their bond by confession and reformation—
but by the time the Congress issued its wholesale invitation, the
New England clergy had so merged the call to repentance with a
stiffening of the patriotic spine that no power on earth, least of
all the government of George III, could separate the acknowl¬
edgment of depravity from the resolution to fight.
Everything the Congress hoped would be said in 1775 had
already been declared by the Reverend Samuel Cooke of the
Second Church in Boston at the election of 1770. 9 If that were
not precedent enough, the General Court on October 22, 1774,
confronting General Gage and the Boston Port Bill, showed how
double-edged was the sword by proclaiming not a fast day but
one of thanksgiving; it was illuminated by the sermon of William
Gordon, from the Third Church in Roxbury, which was all the
more memorable because Gordon had been English-born. 10 On
May 31, 1775, six weeks after Lexington and Concord, Samuel
Langdon, President of Harvard, put the theory of religious revolu¬
tion so completely before the Court (then obliged to meet in
Watertown) that the doctrine of political resistance yet to be
formulated in the Declaration seems but an afterthought. 11 A
few weeks before that assertion, on May 29, 1776, Samuel West
of Dartmouth made clear to the General Court that what was
included within the divine covenant as a subsidiary but essential
portion had been not simply “British liberties” but the whole social
teaching of John Locke. 12 After the evacuation of Boston, both
Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to assemble as of old,
and comfortably listen to a recital of their shortcomings, secure
in the knowledge that as long as jeremiads denounced them,
their courage could not fail. The fluctuations of the conflict called
for many days of humiliation and a few for thanksgiving; in
Massachusetts, the framing of the state constitution in 1780
evoked another spate of clerical lectures on the direct connection
*lbid., pp. 147—186.
10 Ibid., pp. 187-226.
11 Ibid, pp. 227-258.
™Ibid.j pp. 259-322.
PERRY MILLER 257
between piety and politics. Out of the years between the Stamp
Act and the Treaty of Paris emerged a formidable, exhaustive
(in general, a repetitious) enunciation of the unique necessity
for America to win her way by reiterated acts of repentance. The
jeremiad, which in origin had been an engine of Jehovah, thus
became temporarily a service department of the Continental army.
The student of New England’s literature is not astonished to
find this venerable machine there put to patriotic use; what has
not been appreciated is how readily it could be set to work in
other sections. On this day of humiliation, July 20, 1775, Thomas
Coombe, an Anglican minister at Christ’s Church and St. Peter’s
in Philadelphia, who once had been chaplain to the Marquis of
Rockingham, explained, in language which would at once have
been recognized in Connecticut, that our fast will prove ineffectual
unless we execute a genuine reformation of manners (interest¬
ingly enough, the printed text is dedicated to Franklin):
We must return to that decent simplicity of manners, that sober
regard to ordinances, that strict morality of demeanor, which char¬
acterized our plain forefathers; and for the decay of which, their sons
are but poorly compensated by all the superfluities of commerce. We
must associate to give a new tone and vigor to the drooping state of
religion among ourselves. We must support justice, both public and
private, give an open and severe check to vices of every sort, and by
our example discourage those luxurious customs and fashions, which
serve but to enervate the mind and bodies of our children; drawing
them off from such manly studies and attainments, as alone can
render them amiable in youth or respectable in age . 13
This Philadelphia Anglican combined as neatly as any Yankee
the call for patriotic resistance and the old cry of Cotton Mather
that the people respond to a jeremiad by implementing Essays To
Do Good. By Coombe’s standard, Quaker Philadelphia would ap¬
pear to be a Babylon, but the opportunity for salvation was at
last providentially offered: “Let such persons, however, now be
told, that patriotism without piety is mere grimace.” 14
Thus we should not be surprised that Jacob Duche, preaching
on this same July 20 before not only his Anglican parish but the
assembled Congress, portrayed the whole trouble as "a national
punishment” inflicted on "national guilt.” He surveyed, as did all
"Puritan” speakers, the manifest favors God had shown the
colonies, and then diagnosed their present affliction as centering
13 Tbomas Coombe, A Sermon , Philadelphia, 1775, pp. 11—12.
“Ibid., p. 15.
258 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
not on the iniquity of the British Cabinet (iniquitous as it un¬
doubtedly was) but rather on the infidelity of Americans:
. . . have we not rather been so far carried away by the stream of
prosperity, as to be forgetful of the source from whence it was derived?
So elevated by the prospect, which peace and a successful commerce
have opened to us, as to neglect those impressions of goodness, which
former affections had left upon our hearts.
Was it not palpably for this reason, and this alone, "that the
Almighty hath bared his arm against us?” If so, the answer for
Duche, as for President Langdon, was clear: by reformation of
manners, by a return to primitive piety, we would, as a united
people, win the cause of American liberty. "Go on, ye chosen band
of Christians,” he cried to the Congress. 15 The fact that after the
Declaration Duche lost heart and turned Loyalist does not make
his The American Vine any less a spiritual jeremiad of the sort
that most invigorated Patriot courage.
The way the War went, and especially the British occupation
of Philadelphia, prevented among the middle states the copious
displays that flowed from the presses of Boston and Worcester.
Even so, there was some sort of printing shop in Lancaster, and
there in 1778 Hugh Henry Brackenridge brought out Six Political
Discourses Founded on the Scripture . Known to fame—such fame
as he has—for his picaresque novel of the 1790’s, Modem Chiv¬
alry, Brackenridge figures in our histories as a Jeffersonian ration-
alist. So profound is the spirit of the Enlightenment displayed in
this work that we are convinced that he could not have later
imbibed it, but must have learned it at Princeton, where he was
classmate and friend of Madison and Freneau. In 1778, however,
he was an ordained Presbyterian minister; hence this fugitive
publication is of more than passing interest as illustrating the
continuation, three years after the first day of national humilia¬
tion, of the religious conception of the struggle. George III, declares
Brackenridge, was instigated by Satan; divine providence must
perforce be on the patriot side. "Heaven hath taken an active part,
and waged war for us.” This he can say, even when the British
hold Philadelphia! However, he can produce Saratoga for evi¬
dence. Hence it is clear that "Heaven knows nothing of neutrality,”
providence is the agency of God, and "there is not one tory to be
found amongst the order of the seraphim.” For our reverses we
must have only our own sins to blame, and the surest way to
victory is our conversion: "it becomes every one in the day of
“Jacob Duche, The American Vine, Philadelphia, 1775, pp. 24-26.
PERRY MILLER 259
storm and sore commotion, to fly swiftly to the rock of Christ
Jesus!” Granted that a man like Brackenridge might cleverly play
upon these stops to excite a pious auditory, still it is evident that
these were the appeals even a rational patriot would need to
sound. 16
To glance for a moment at the other end of the geographical
spectrum: the people of Georgia had so far in their brief history
found few opportunities to promote themselves into the role of
an elected community; certainly the saints of Connecticut would
never suppose Georgians equal in standing before the Lord with
themselves. Still, when the Provincial Congress of Georgia met
in 1775, before proceeding to support the Revolution they first
listened to a clerical address—for all the world as though they
were in Connecticut—by the Reverend John J. Zubly. It was
printed in Philadelphia as The Law of Liberty.
Zubly reproduces the pattern of New England argumentation,
though perhaps with somewhat less provincial egotism. These
Americans are the result of a consecutive unfolding of God's
covenant with mankind, now come to a climax on this continent;
for Americans, the exercise of liberty becomes simply the one
true obedience to God. This is not license, but resistance to sin;
those who do not combat depravity will be judged:
We are not to imagine because the gospel is a law of liberty, there¬
fore men will not be judged; on the contrary judgment will be the
more severe against all who have heard and professed the gospel, and
yet walked contrary to its precepts and doctrines.
By this logic, once more, patriotic resistance to England is a way
—the only way—to avert the wrath of Jehovah. 17
If anywhere among the states the lineaments of Puritan fed¬
eral theology would be dim, one might suppose that place to be
Charleston, South Carolina. Legend continually obscures for us,
however, how profoundly Protestant the culture of that region
was at this time and for several decades afterwards. In 1774
William Tennent, son of the great William of Log College, ex¬
pounded to planters and merchants that they were threatened
with slavery because of their transgressions. The first dictate of
natural passion is to imprecate vengeance upon the instruments
of our torment, to resolve to endure hardships rather than sur¬
render the privileges of our ancestors. But this, Tennent ex-
16 H. H. Brackenridge, Six Political Discourses Pounded on the Scripture ,
Lancaster, 1778, pp. 50-61.
17 John J. Zubly, The Law of Liberty , Philadelphia, 1775, p. 6.
260 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
plained, is the wrong procedure. The first duty of good men is
to find out and bewail “the Iniquities of our Nation and country,”
which are the true causes of the dismal catastrophe about to
befall us. 18
Though by now the Revolution has been voluminously, and
one might suppose exhaustively, studied, we still do not realize
how effective were generations of Protestant preaching in evoking
patriotic enthusiasm. No interpretation of the religious utterances
as being merely sanctimonious window-dressing will do justice
to the facts or to the character of the populace. Circumstances
and the nature of the dominant opinion in Europe made it neces-
sary for the official statement to be released in primarily “political”
terms—the social compact, inalienable rights, the right of revolu-
tion. But those terms, in and by themselves, would never have
supplied the drive to victory, however mightily they weighed with
the literate minority. What carried the ranks of militia and citi-
zens was the universal persuasion that they, by administering
to themselves a spiritual purge, acquired the energies God had
always, in the manner of the Old Testament, been ready to im¬
part to His repentant children. Their first responsibility was not
to shoot redcoats but to cleanse themselves; only thereafter to
take aim. Notwithstanding the chastisements we have already
received, proclaimed the Congress on March 20, 1779—they no
longer limited themselves to mere recommending—“too few have
been sufficiently awakened to a sense of their guilt, or warmed
with gratitude, or taught to amend their fives and turn from their
sins, so He might turn from His wrath.” They call for still another
fast in April, 1780: “To make us sincerely penitent for our trans¬
gressions; to prepare us for deliverance, and to remove the evil
with which he hath been pleased to visit us; to banish vice and
irrefigion from among us, and establish virtue and piety by his
Divine grace. And when there did come a cause for rejoicing
(almost the only one in four or five years that might justify their
using other vestibule, the surrender of Burgoyne), patriots gave
little thought to lengthening fines of supply or the physical ob¬
stacles of logistics; instead, they beheld Providence at work
again, welcomed Louis XVI as their “Christian ally,” and con¬
gratulated themselves upon that which had really produced vic-
“WRIiam Tennent, An Address, Occasioned by the Late Invasion of the
Liberties of the American Colonies by the British Parliament, Philadelphia,
1/74, p. 11. Tennent must have charmed his Carolinian audience by ex-
clanuing (p. 17) that if these Judgments have begun in New England, the
bulwark of piety, those awaiting the profane South would be "more dreadful
PERRY MILLER 26l
tory—their success in remodeling themselves. Now more than
ever, asserted the Congress on October 31, 1777, we should “im¬
plore the mercy and forgiveness of God, and beseech him that
vice, profaneness, extortion and every evil may be done away,
and that we may be a reformed and a happy people.” 19
II
Historians of English political thought have reduced to a com¬
monplace of inevitable progression the shift of Puritan political
philosophy from the radical extreme of 1649 to the genial uni-
versals of 1689. John Locke so codified the later versions as to
make the “Glorious Revolution” seem a conservative reaction. As
we know, Locke was studied with avidity in the colonies; hence
the Congress used consummate strategy in presenting their case
to a candid world through the language of Locke.
Nevertheless, we do know that well before the Civil War
began in England, Parliamentarians—and these include virtually
all Puritans—had asserted that societies are founded upon cov¬
enant; that the forms of a particular society, even though dictated
by utilitarian factors, are of divine ordination; that rulers who
violate the agreed-upon forms are usurpers and so to be legiti¬
mately resisted. This complex of doctrine was transported bodily
to early Virginia and most explicitly to Puritan New England. The
turmoils of Massachusetts Bay—the expulsion of Roger Williams
and Anne Hutchinson, the exile of Robert Child, the disciplining
of the Hingham militia, and the first trials of the Quakers—
whatever other issues were involved in them, were crises in the
political creed. Governor Winthrop was not much troubled, though
possibly a bit, when he told the men of Hingham that in signing
the covenant they had agreed to submit to rulers set over them
for their own good—unless they could positively prove that their
rulers were the violators!
The development of New England, however, steadily encouraged
the citizens to deduce that they themselves, in framing the com¬
pact, had enumerated the items which made up their good. John
Cotton and John Winthrop, having entirely accepted the contrac¬
tual idea, were still making within it a last-ditch stand for medi¬
eval scholasticism by contending that the positive content of the
magisterial function had been prescribed by God long before any
39 Morris, pp. 533-536.
262 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
specific covenant, whether of Israel or of Massachusetts, was
drawn up. By the mid-eighteenth century, even in "semi-Presby-
teriaT Connecticut, good Christians were certain they could
designate both the duties and the limitations of magistrates. In
basically similar fashion, though not so easily traceable, the same
transformation was wrought among the Protestant, or at least
among the “Calvinistic,” elements of all the communities. To put
the matter bluntly, the agitation which resulted in the War for
American Independence commenced after an immense change
had imperceptibly been wrought in the minds of the people. That
they needed from 1765 to 1776 to realize this was not because
they had, under stress, to acquire the doctrine from abroad, but
because they did have to search their souls in order to discover
what actually had happened within themselves.
Consequently, every preacher of patriotism was obliged to
complicate his revolutionary jeremiad by careful demonstrations
of exactly how the will of almighty God had itself always oper¬
ated through the voluntary self-imposition of a compact, how it
had provided for legitimate, conservative resistance to tyrants.
Early in the eighteenth century, John Wise prophesied how this
union of concepts would be achieved, but he seems to have had
no direct effect on the patriot argument. Jonathan Mayhew was
far ahead of his fellows; after his death in 1766 the others required
hard work to catch up. In general it may be said that they started
off serenely confident that of course the philosophy of the jere¬
miad, which required abject confession of unworthiness from an
afflicted people, and that of the social compact, which called
for immediate and vigorous action against an intruding magis¬
trate, were one and the same. Then, discovering that the jo inin g
required more carpentry than they had anticipated, they labored
for all they were worth at the task. Finally, by 1776, they tri¬
umphantly asserted that they had indeed succeeded, that the
day of hu m il i ation was demonstrably one with the summons to
battle.
Political historians and secular students of theory are apt to
extract from the context those paragraphs devoted solely to the
social position, to discuss these as comprising the only contribu-
tion of the “black regiment” to Revolutionary argument. 20 To read
^For example, Ahce Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American
Revolution, Durham, N.C., 1928, a pioneer work of great value, but upon
which later histonans have unhappily depended. In this view, I should take
Clanton Bossiter, Seedtime of the Republic , New York, 1953, as representing
the strain of obtuse secularism. &
PERRY MILLER 263
these passages in isolation is to miss the point. They were effective
with the masses not as sociological lectures but because, being
embedded in the jeremiads, they made comprehensible the other¬
wise troubling double injunction of humiliation and exertion. In
this complicated pattern (which could be offered as the ultimate
both in right reason and in true piety), the mentality of American
Protestantism became so reconciled to itself, so joyfully convinced
that it had at last found its long-sought identity, that for the time
being it forgot that it had ever had any other reason for existing.
A few examples out of thousands will suffice. Gordon’s Dis¬
course of December 15, 1774, runs for page after page in the
standardized jeremiad vein: "Is not this people strangely degen¬
erated, so as to possess but a faint resemblance of that godliness
for which their forefathers were eminent?” Is it not horrible
beyond all imagination that this people should degenerate, seeing
how scrupulously God has befriended them according to the stip¬
ulations of their covenant with Him? Yet the ghastly fact is ""that
while there is much outward show of respect to the Deity, there
is but little inward heart conformity to him.” And so on and on,
until abruptly, with hardly a perceptible shift, we are hearing a
recital of the many palpable evidences that Divine Providence is
already actively engaged in the work. Only by the direct ""inspira¬
tion of the Most High” could the unanimity of the colonies have
been brought about. From this point Gordon’s cheerful jeremiad
comes down to the utilitarian calculation that Americans are
expert riflemen, wherefore ""the waste of amunition will be greatly
prevented”; after which he concludes by urging the people to
""accept our punishment at his hands without murmuring or
complaining” ! 21
The elements woven together in this and other speeches can,
of course, be separated one from another in the antiseptic calm
of the historian’s study, and the whole proved to be an unstable
compound of incompatible propositions. What may be left out of
account is the impact of the entire argument, the wonderful
fusion of political doctrine with the traditional rite of self-abase¬
ment which, out of colonial experience, had become not what it
might seem on the surface, a failure of will, but a dynamo for
generating action.
President Langdon’s sermon of May, 1775, played a slight vari¬
ation on the theme by suggesting that the notorious crimes of
England had brought these troubles as a divine visitation on her!
^Thornton, pp. 208, 212, 225.
264 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Other preachers occasionally toyed with this device, but obviously
it was not the full-throated note the populace expected and
wanted. Langdon returned to the really effective music when he
justified the afflictions of America:
But alas! have not the sins of America, and of New England in
particular, had a hand in bringing down upon us the righteous judg¬
ments of Heaven? Wherefore is all this evil come upon us? Is it not
because we have foresaken the Lord? Can we say we are innocent of
crimes against God? No surely.
After several pages of such conventional self-accusation, the moral
emerges as easily in 1775 as it used to flow from the mouth of
Cotton Mather: “However unjustly and cruelly we have been
treated by man, we certainly deserve, at the hand of God, all the
calamities in which we are now involved.” 22
Then follows a turn which is indeed novel, which reveals the
subtle yet largely unconscious transformation that the Revolution
was actually working in the hearts of the people. Langdon con¬
cludes his jeremiad by calling upon Americans to repent and
reform, because if true religion can be revived, “we may hope
for the direction and blessing of the most High, while we are
using our best endeavors to preserve and restore the civil govern¬
ment of this colony, and defend America from slavery.” 23
Here, in exquisite precision, is the logic of the clerical exhorta¬
tion which, though it may seem to defy logic, gives a vivid insight
into what had happened to the pious mentality of the communi¬
ties. For, Langdon’s argument runs, once we have purged our¬
selves and recovered our energies in the act of contrition, how
then do we go about proving the sincerity of our repentance (and
insuring that Divine Providence will assist us)? We hereupon
act upon the principles of John Locke! At this point, and not until
after these essential preliminaries, Langdon turns to his exposition
of Whig doctrine:
Thanks be to God that he has given us, as men, natural rights,
independent of all human laws whatever, and that these rights are
recognized by the grand charter of British liberties. By the law of
nature, any body of people, destitute of order and government, may
form themselves into a civil society according to their best prudence,
and so provide for their common safety and advantage. When one
form is found by the majority not to answer the grand purpose in any
n Ibid ., p. 247.
“Ibid., p. 249.
PERRY MILLER 265
tolerable degree, they may, by common consent, put an end to it and
set up another . 24
The next year, Samuel West of Dartmouth persuaded the
General Court of Massachusetts, not to mention readers elsewhere
in the colonies, that the inner coherence of the thesis was main¬
tained by these two combined doctrines: while, because of our
abysmally sinful condition, we must obey magistrates for con¬
science’ sake, we also find "that when rulers become oppressive
to the subject and injurious to the state, their authority, their
respect, their maintenance, and the duty of submitting to them,
must immediately cease; they are then to be considered as the
ministers of Satan, and as such, it becomes our indispensable
duty to resist and oppose them.” 25 What we today have to grasp is
that for the masses this coalescence of abnegation and assertion,
this identification of Protestant self-distrust with confidence in
divine aid, erected a frame for the natural-rights philosophy
wherein it could work with infinitely more power than if it had
been propounded exclusively in the language of political rational¬
ism.
There were, it should be pointed out, a few clerics who could
become patriots without having to go through this labyrinth of
national humiliation. But in the colonies they were a minority,
and they came from a Protestantism which had never been per¬
meated by the federal theology—which is to say, they were
generally Anglicans. The most conspicuous was William Smith,
later Provost of the College of Philadelphia. When he responded
to the Congressional recommendation, on July 20, 1775, at All-
Saints in Philadelphia, he emphasized his dissent from the cov-
enantal conception at once:
I would, therefore, cherish these good dispositions; and what may,
peradventure, have begun through Fear, I would ripen into maturity
by the more cheering beams of Love. Instead of increasing your afflic¬
tions, I would convey a dawn of comfort to your souls; rather striving
to woo and to win you to Religion and Happiness, from a consideration
of what God hath promised to the Virtuous, than of what He hath
denounced against the Wicked, both through Time and in Eternity. 2 ®
A historian not versed in the discriminations of theology may
see little difference, considered as propaganda, between Provost
Smith’s form of Christian exhortation and President Langdon’s,
u Ihid. 9 p. 250.
*Ibid., p. 296.
*The Works of William Smith, D.D., Philadelphia, 1803, 11, 119.
266 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
since Smith also aligns the Providence of God on the side of
resistance. But for men of 1775—that is for most of them—
there was a vast gulf between Smith’s conception and that of the
New Englanders, of Coombe, of Duche, of Zubly. The really
effective work of the “black regiment” was not an optimistic ap¬
peal to the rising glory of America, but their imparting a sense
of crisis by revivifying Old Testament condemnations of a degen¬
erate people.
Smith’s method, however, did have one advantage: more readily
than the Puritans and Presbyterians, he could promise that God
would bless a victorious America with prosperity, with that “hap¬
piness” which the Declaration said all men had a natural right to
pursue. Smith did note in passing that we must repent and sin¬
cerely reform our naughty manners, 27 but his recruiting sermons
pay much more attention than do those of New England or of
the back-country to the strictly legal contention. These generally
conclude, as did one to a battalion of militia on June 25, 1775,
with the earthly rewards in prospect:
Illiberal or mistaken plans of policy may distress us for a while,
and perhaps sorely check our growth; but if we maintain our own
virtue; if we cultivate the spirit of Liberty among our children; if we
guard against the snares of luxury, venality and corruption; the Genius
of America will still rise triumphant, and that with a power at last
too mighty for opposition. This country will be free—nay, for ages to
come a chosen seat of Freedom, Arts, and Heavenly Knowledge; which
are now either drooping or dead in those countries of the old world. 2 ®
Surely Smith’s logic is straightforward. On December 28, 1778,
he preached before a Masonic chapter and dedicated the sermon
to Washington. There is no mention in it of affliction; hardships,
even unto death, are to be borne in a spirit of Christian fortitude,
and Christians are simply to fight the good fight, confident that
when they die they shall have full scope for the exercise of
charity. 29 But, though Smith’s form of Christianity, with its piety
hardly more than a species of Stoicism, might appeal to Wash¬
ington and prove unobjectionable even to Jefferson, and though
Smith delivered a heartfelt eulogy on Benjamin Franklin, 30 it was
neither Smith’s genial Anglicanism nor the urbane rationalism
of these statesmen which brought the rank and file of American
*Ibid., pp. 123, 138.
28 Ibid pp. 283-284.
p. 67.
ZQ Ibid., 1 , 44-92.
PERRY MILLER 267
Protestants into the War. What aroused a Christian patriotism
that needed staying power was a realization of the vengeance
God denounced against the wicked; what fed their hopes was
not what God promised as a recompense to virtue, but what
dreary fortunes would overwhelm those who persisted in sloth,
what kept them going was an assurance that by exerting them¬
selves they were fighting for a victory thus providentially pre¬
destined.
To examine the Revolutionary mind from the side of its reli¬
gious emotion is to gain a perspective that cannot be acquired
from the ordinary study of the papers of the Congresses, the
letters of Washington, the writings of Dickinson, Paine, Freneau,
or John Adams. The “decent respect” that these Founders enter¬
tained for the opinion of mankind caused them to put their case
before the civilized world in the restricted language of the rational
century. A successful revolution, however, requires not only leader¬
ship but receptivity. Ideas in the minds of the foremost gentlemen
may not be fully shared by their followers, but these followers
will accept the ideas, even adopt them, if such abstractions can
be presented in an acceptable context. To accommodate the prin¬
ciples of a purely secular social compact and a right to resist
taxation—even to the point of declaring political independence
to a provincial community where the reigning beliefs were still
original sin and the need of grace—this was the immense task
performed by the patriotic clergy.
Our mental image of the religious patriot is distorted because
modem accounts do treat the political paragraphs as a series of
theoretical expositions of Locke, separated from what precedes
and follows. When these orations axe read as wholes, they imme¬
diately reveal that the sociological sections are structural parts
of a rhetorical pattern. Embedded in their contexts, these axe not
abstractions but inherent parts of a theology. It was for this
reason that they had so energizing an effect upon their religious
auditors. The American situation, as the preachers saw it, was not
what Paine presented in Common Sense —a community of hax
working, rational creatures being put upon by an irrational tyrant
—but was more like the recurrent predicament of the chosen
people in the Bible. As Samuel Cooper declared on October 25,
1780, upon the inauguration of the Constitution of Massachusetts,
America was a new Israel, selected to be “a theatre for the disp ay
of some of the most astonishing dispensations of his Providence.
The Jews originally were a free republic founded on a covenant
over which God “in peculiar favor to that people, was pleased to
268 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
preside.” When they offended Him, He punished them by destroy¬
ing their republic, subjecting them to a king. Thus while we today
need no revelation to inform us that we are all bom free and
equal and that sovereignty resides in the people—"these are the
plain dictates of that reason and common sense with which the
common parent has informed the human bosom”—still Scripture
also makes these truths explicit. Hence when we angered our
God, a king was also inflicted upon us; happily, Americans have
succeeded, where the Jews did not, in recovering something of
pristine virtue, whereupon Heaven redressed America’s earthly
grievances. Only as we today appreciate the formal unity of the
two cosmologies, the rational and the Biblical, do we take in
the full import of Cooper’s closing salute to the new Constitution:
"How nicely it poises the powers of government, in order to render
them as far as human foresight can, what God ever designed
they should be, power only to do good.” 31
Once this light is allowed to play on the scene, we perceive the
shallowness of that view which would treat the religious appeal
as a calculated propaganda maneuver. The ministers did not have
to "sell” the Revolution to a public sluggish to "buy.” They were
spelling out what both they and the people sincerely believed, nor
were they distracted by worries about the probability that Jeffer¬
son held all their constructions to be nonsense. A pure rational¬
ism such as his might have declared the independence of these
folk, but it could never have inspired them to fight for it.
This assertion may seem too sweeping, but without our making
it we can hardly comprehend the state in which American Prot¬
estantism found itself when the victory was won. A theology
which for almost two centuries had assumed that men would
persistently sin, and so would have to be recurrently summoned
to communal repentance, had for the first time identified its
basic conception with a specific political action. Then, for the
first time in the life of the conception, the cause was totally
gained. Did not a startling inference follow: these people must
have reformed themselves completely, must now dwell on a pin¬
nacle of virtuousness? But there was no place in the theology of
the covenant for a people to congratulate themselves. There was
a station only for degenerates in need of regeneration, who occa¬
sionally might thank God for this or that mercy He granted them,
forgiving their imperfections. Where could Protestantism turn’
11 C 14 P 15 2 Q Sermon Preached * • • October 25, 1780, Boston, 1780,
PERRY MILRER 269
what could it employ, in order still to hold the religious respect
of this now victorious society?
in
An Anglican rationalist, as we have seen with William Smith,
would have no difficulty about the sequence of statements which
said that by resisting England we would assure the future P r ° s_
perity of the republic. The patriotic Jeremiahs also employed the
argument, but they had to be more circumspect. Protestant politi¬
cal thinking had never doubted, of course, that God institute
government among men as a means toward their temporal fe icity
—or, at least toward their “safety.” But it always based its phi¬
losophy upon the premise of original sin. Since the Fall, ha
men been left in a pure state of nature, all would have been
Ishmaels; no man’s life, family, or property would be secure. So,
government was primarily a check on evil impulses; its function
was negative rather than positive; it was to restrain violence, not
to advance arts, sciences, technology. Yet, as Governor John
Winthrop agreed during the first years of Massachusetts Bay,
because “solus populi supremo, lex” there was a corollary (lurking
out of sight) that government ought, once it restrained the lusts
of these people, to do something more creative about making them
comfortable.
Tn the negativistic emphasis of Protestant teachings, the reason
for King George’s violence and the consequent righteousness of
resisting him were easy to make out. He and his ministers were
violating the compact, so that he had become Ishmael. Law-
abiding subjects were defending social barriers which, if once
broken through, would cease to confine all social passions. By
defying Britain they were preserving mankind from a descent into
chaos. Resistance to a madman is not revolution; it is, in obedi¬
ence to God, an exercise of the police power. .
Yet what happens to particles of this logic when to it is joined
the contention that by such resistance the righteous not only obey
God but acquire wealth for themselves and their children? How
can the soldier venture everything in the holy cause, after having
confessed his depravity, if all the time he has a secret suspicion
that by going through this performance he in fact is not so much
repenting as gaining affluence for his society?
In most of the patriotic jeremiads the material inducement is
entered—sometimes, we may say, smuggled in. It could not be
270 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
left out. Yet once the machinery of national humiliation proved
effective in producing the providential victory of the Americans,
were they not bound to the prophecy that by their utilization of
the form, they, and they alone, would bring about a reign of
national bliss? But in that case how could a confession of un¬
worthiness be sincere?
An uneasy awareness of the dilemma was present even in the
early stages of agitation. listen, for instance, to Samuel Williams,
pastor of the Church in Bradford, delivering A Discourse on the
Love of Country , December 15, 1774:
As what should further confirm our attachment to our native coun¬
try, it bids the fairest of any to promote the perfection and happiness
of mankind. We have but few principles from which we can argue
with certainty, what will be the state of mankind in future ages. But
if we may judge the designs of providence, by the number and power
of the causes that are already at work, we shall be led to think that
the perfection and happiness of mankind is to be carried further in
America, than it has ever yet been in any place. 32
This passage is only one of hundreds in the same vein, and
all wrestle with the same dubious contention: we have sinned,
therefore we are afflicted by the tyranny of a corrupt Britain;
we must repent and reform, in order to win the irresistible aid of
Providence; once we have wholeheartedly performed this act, we
shall be able to exert our freedom by expelling the violators of
the compact; when we succeed we shall enter upon a prosperity
and temporal happiness beyond anything the world has hitherto
seen. But always implicit in this chain of reasoning was a vague
suggestion that the people were being bribed into patriotism. And
by universal admission, the occasion for a nation’s deserting its
Maker and surrendering to sensuality was always an excess of
material comforts. So, was not the whole machinery an ironic
device for bringing upon the children of the victors judgments
still more awful than any that had previously been imposed?
The clergy had, in short, simplified the once massive com¬
plexity of the process of social regeneration by concentrating
its terrorizing appeal upon a single hardship, the British govern¬
ment. Seventeenth-century theologians would have been more
wary. They took pains to keep the list so long—draught, fires,
earthquakes, insects, small-pox, shipwrecks—that while the peo¬
ple by their holy exertions might be let off this or that misery,
“Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Country, Salem, 1775 ,
p» 22.
PERRY MILLER 27I
they were sure to be tormented by some other. The Revolutionary
divines, in their zeal for liberty, committed themselves unwittingly
to the proposition that in this case expulsion of the British would
automatically leave America a pure society. In their righteous
anger, they painted gorier and gorier pictures of the depravity of
England. Said President Langdon, ‘The general prevalence of vice
has changed the whole face of things in the British government > 33
wherefore it had to follow that the sins of the colonial peoples,
which brought down the Intolerable Acts, were in great part
“iiffections” received from “the corruption of European courts.
But then, once we innoculated ourselves against these contagions,
would we not become a people washed white in the Blood of the
Lamb?
The progress of events which led the patriots from their initial
defense of “British liberties” to the radical plunge into independ¬
ence also led them to this doctrinaire identification of religious
exertion with the political aim. By 1776 Samuel West made it
crystal clear:
Our cause is so just and good that nothing can prevent our success
but only our sins. Could I see a spirit of repentance and reformation
prevail through the land, I should not have the least apprehension or
fear of being brought under the iron rod of slavery, even though all
the powers of the globe were combined against us. And though I
confess that the irreligion and profaneness which are so common
among us gives something of a damp to my spirits, yet I cannot help
hoping, and even believing, that Providence has designed this conti¬
nent for to be the asylum of liberty and true religion; for can we
suppose that the God who created us free agents, and designed that
we should glorify and serve him in this world that we might enjoy
him forever hereafter, will suffer liberty and true religion to be ban¬
ished from off the face of the earth? 34
What else, then, could President Ezra Stiles of Yale College
preach upon, before the General Assembly of Connecticut, on
May 8, 1783, but The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor ?
This will be a great, a very great nation, nearly equal to half Eu¬
rope. . . . Before the millennium the English settlements in America
may become more numerous millions than the greatest do mini on on
earth, the Chinese Empire. Should this prove a future fact, how appli¬
cable would be the text, when the Lord shall have made his American
Israel Li gh above all nations which he has made, in numbers, and in
praise, and in name, and in honor I 35
38 Thomton, p. 243 .
“Ibid., p. 311 .
“Ibid., p. 440 .
272 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Still, the more closely we study this literature of exultation,
the more we suspect that the New Englanders were dismayed by
the very magnitude of their success. The Middle States were less
inhibited. Most revelatory is George Duffield’s A Sermon Preached
in the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia on December
11, 1783—the day that Congress could at long last conscientiously
appoint a “Tha^sgiving/" It was now abundantly clear, said
Duflield, that from the beginning the Revolution had been under
providential direction. We have created a nation which shall re¬
ceive the poor and oppressed: “here shall the husbandman enjoy
the fruits of his labor; the merchant trade, secure of his gain;
the mechanic indulge his inventive genius; and the sons of
science pursue their delightful employment, till the light of knowl¬
edge pervade yonder yet uncultivated western wilds, and form
the savage inhabitants into men/" In the exuberance of triumph,
Duffield permitted h i m self to say, in effect, that the jeremiad had
also triumphed, and that we, being a completely reformed nation,
need no longer be summoned to humiliation!
A day whose evening shall not terminate in night; but introduce
that joyful period, when the outcasts of Israel, and the dispersed of
Judah, shall be restored; and with them, the fulness of the Gentile
world shall flow to the standard of redeeming love: And the nations
of the earth, become the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour. Under
whose auspicious reign holiness shall universally prevail; and the noise
and alarm of war be heard no more. 36
In this situation—if all the nation participated, as most of it
did, in the assurances of Duffield’s te Deum —there would be,
at least for the moment, no further use for the jeremiad. A
few New Englanders, along with President Witherspoon of
Princeton, cautioned the people that while indeed God had blessed
them beyond all expectation, they now had the further responsi¬
bility of perpetuating the reformation, but theirs were but feeble
admonitions compared with the compulsions of the dark days of
1775. Because the program of salvation had been combined with
the struggle for nationhood, American Protestants were obliged
to see in the Treaty of Paris the fulfillment of prophecies. Ezra
Stiles took as his text Deuteronomy xxvi. 19, a verse that long
had done yeoman’s service as a club for beating backsliders, and
then explained that on this occasion he selected it “only as intro¬
ductory to a discourse upon the political welfare of God’s Ameri-
^George Duflield, A Sermon Preached in the Third Presbyterian Church
Philadelphia, 1784, pp. 16-17, 18.
PERRY MILLER 273
can Israel, and as allusively prophetic of the future prosperity
and splendor of the United States/’ 37 This by implication does
pretend that the reformation had been entirely successful. So,
with some reluctance, Stiles suggests that with the finish of the
colonial era we have come also to the close of the jeremiad:
And while we have to lament our Laodiceanism, deficient morals,
and incidental errors, yet the collective system of evangelical doctrines,
the instituted ordinances, and the true ecclesiastical polity, may be
found here in a great degree of purity. 38
Whereupon a c hill strikes the exulting heart. If this be so, are
we not, under the Providence of God, on leaving the exciting
scenes both of war and spiritual conflict, now headed for a
monotonous, an uninteresting prosperity, the flatness of universal
virtue?
These people, however, had for a long time been disciplined to
the expectation of woe. The government of the Confederacy be¬
came mired in confusion, thus clouding once more any reading
of God’s design. While the States were devising a Constitution
to correct this affliction, the blow was struck; but not in America
—in Paris. At first, of course, the fall of the Bastille seemed to
strengthen the alliance of social doctrine and religious hope.
Shortly the fallacy became evident. Not that there was any
serious threat in America of a reversion to the depraved state of
nature which engulfed France in 1793; yet in this glorious re¬
public the French Revolution brought home to the devout an
immediate realization of the need for dissociating the Christian
conception of life from any blind commitment to the philosophy
of that Revolution. Indeed, they had no choice ultimately but to
abandon the whole political contention of either of the two revo¬
lutions, and to seek at once some other program for Christian
solidarity. They did not need to renounce the Declaration, nor even
to denounce the Constitution, but only henceforth to take those
principles for granted, yield government to the secular concept of
the social compact, accept the First Amendment, and so to con¬
centrate, in order to resist Deism and to save their souls, upon
that other mechanism of cohesion developed out of their colonial
experience, the Revival.
It took them until about the year 1800 to recast—or, as they
believed, to recover—their history. Amid the great revivals which
swept over Connecticut, Kentucky, and Tennessee in that year.
“Thornton, p. 403.
“Ifcid., p. 473.
2,?4 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
which, expanded into Georgia, Illinois, and for decades burned
over northern New York, the Revolution was again and again
presented as having been itself a majestic Revival. The leadership
of Jefferson, Paine, and the rationalists was either ignored or
explained away. The "Second Great Awakening” engendered the
denominational forms of American Protestantism which still en¬
dure, but perhaps equally important was its work in confirming
the American belief that the Revolution had not been at all
revolutionary, but simply a protest of native piety against foreign
impiety.
TRANSFORMATION
THE REVOLUTION IN IDEALS
If the Revolution was in origin and at its center basic¬
ally a conservative protest movement against what ap¬
peared to the men of the Revolution to have been a
tyrannical assault upon American liberty and property
by Britain's government, it also contained, as several
recent works have emphasized, significant radical ele¬
ments. The two selections that follow strongly suggest
that it was the implications of Revolutionary thought—
the radical thrust of its ideals—that made the Revolu¬
tion something more than a defensive war for independ¬
ence and gave it a truly revolutionary character. The
first selection argues that the Revolution brought about
a “radical idealization and rationalization of the previous
century and a half' of what, by European standards, had
been an extremely radical experience and, thereby, un¬
leashed a set of ideas that, as the author has emphasized
elsewhere, ultimately helped to transform many of the
essentials of American life. The second selection con¬
siders what the author regards as the four principal
achievements of the Revolution and analyzes the radical
nature of each. The two achievements given primary
emphasis—the sudden and permanent commitment to
republicanism after 1776 and the philosophy of radical
individualism that was implicit in much of Revolutionary
political thought—lie primarily within the realms of
ideals and beliefs.
cecelia m. kenyon (b. 1922) is a member of the
Department of Government at Smith College.
BERNARD BAILYN 377
Political Experience and Enlightenment
Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America
BERNARD BAILYN
The political and social ideas of the European Enlightenment
have had a peculiar importance in American history. More uni¬
versally accepted in eighteenth-century America than in Europe,
they were more completely and more permanently embodied m
the formal arrangements of state and society; and, less contro¬
verted, less subject to criticism and dispute, they have lived on
more vigorously into later periods, more continuous and more
intact. The peculiar force of these ideas in America resulted from
many causes. But originally, and basically, it resulted from the
circumstances of the prerevolutionary period and from the bearing
of these ideas on the political experience of the American colo-
What this bearing was—the nature of the relationship between
Enlightenment ideas and early American political experience—
is a matter of particular interest at the present time because it
is centrally involved in what amounts to a fundamental revision
of early American history now under way. By implication if not
direct evidence and argument, a number of recent writings have
undermined much of the structure of historical thought by which,
for a generation or more, we have understood our eighteenth-
century origins, and in particular have placed new and insup¬
portable pressures on its central assumption concerning the po¬
litical significance of Enlightenment thought. Yet the need for
rather extensive rebuilding has not been felt, in part because the
architecture has not commonly been seen as a whole as a unit,
that is, of mutually dependent parts related to a central premise
—in part because the damage has been piecemeal and uncoordi¬
nated: here a beam destroyed, there a stone dislodged, the inner
supports only slowly weakened and the balance only gradually
thrown off. The edifice still stands, mainly, it seems, by habit and
by the force of inertia. A brief consideration of the whole, conse-
Reprinted with permission from American Historical Review, LXVII, 2
(January, 1962), 339—351. ,
Note: This paper was presented in a briefer form to the 11th International
Congress of Historical Sciences, Stockholm, 1960. As printed here, it was
read at the Massachusetts Historical Society, January 12, 1961.
278 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
quently, a survey from a position fax enough above the details to
see the outlines of the over-all architecture, and an attempt, how¬
ever tentative, to sketch a line—a principle—of reconstruction
would seem to be in order.
A basic, organizing assumption of the group of ideas that domi¬
nated the earlier interpretation of eighteenth-century American
history is the belief that previous to the Revolution the political
experience of the colonial Americans had been roughly analogous
to that of the English. Control of public authority had been firmly
held by a native aristocracy—merchants and landlords in the
North, planters in the South—allied, commonly, with British
officialdom. By restricting representation in the provincial assem¬
blies, limiting the franchise, and invoking the restrictive power
of the English state, this aristocracy had dominated the govern¬
mental machinery of the mainland colonies. Their political control,
together with legal devices such as primogeniture and entail, had
allowed them to dominate the economy as well. Not only were
they successful in engrossing landed estates and mercantile for¬
tunes, but they were for the most part able also to fight off the
clamor of yeoman debtors for cheap paper currency, and of de¬
pressed tenants for freehold property. But the control of this
colonial counterpart of a traditional aristocracy, with its Old
World ideas of privilege and hierarchy, orthodoxy in religious
establishment, and economic inequality, was progressively threat¬
ened by the growing strength of a native, frontier-bred democ¬
racy that expressed itself most forcefully in the lower houses of
the ‘"rasing” provincial assemblies. A conflict between the two
groups and ways of life was building up, and it broke out in fury
after 1765.
The outbreak of the Revolution, the argument runs, fundamen¬
tally altered the old regime. The Revolution destroyed the power
of this traditional aristocracy, for the movement of opposition
to parliamentary taxation, 1760-1776, originally controlled by
conservative elements, had been taken over by extremists nour¬
ished on Enlightenment radicalism, and the once dominant con¬
servative groups had gradually been alienated. The break with
England over the question of home rule was part of a general
struggle, as Carl Becker put it, over who shall rule at home.
Independence gave control to the radicals, who, imposing their
advanced doctrines on a traditional society, transformed a rebel¬
lious secession into a social revolution. They created a new regime,
a reformed society, based on enlightened political and social
theory.
BERNARD BAILYN 279
But that is not the end of the story; the sequel is important.
The success of the enlightened radicals during the early years of
the Revolution was notable; but, the argument continues, it was
not wholly unqualified. The remnants of the earlier aristocracy,
though defeated, had not been eliminated: they were able to
reassert themselves in the postwar years. In the 1780’s they
gradually regained power until, in what amounted to a counter¬
revolution, they impressed their views indelibly on history in the
new federal Constitution, in the revocation of some of the more
enthusiastic actions of the earlier revolutionary period, and in the
Hamiltonian program for the new government. This was not, of
course, merely the old regime resurrected. In a new age whose
institutions and ideals had been bom of revolutionary radicalism,
the old conservative elements made adjustments and concessions
by which to survive and periodically to flourish as a force in
American life.
The importance of this formulation derived not merely from
its usefulness in interpreting eighteenth-century history. It pro¬
vided a key also for understanding the entire course of American
politics. By its light, politics in America, from the very beginning,
could be seen to have been a dialectical process in which an
aristocracy of wealth and power struggled with the People, who,
ordinarily ill-organized and inarticulate, rose upon provocation
armed with powerful institutional and ideological weapons, to
reform a periodically corrupt and oppressive polity.
In all of this the underlying assumption is the belief that
Enlightenment thought—the reforming ideas of advanced think¬
ers in eighteenth-century England and on the Continent—had
been the effective lever by which native American radicals had
turned a dispute on imperial relations into a sweeping reformation
of public institutions and thereby laid the basis for American
democracy.
For some time now, and particularly during the last decade, this
interpretation has been fundamentally weakened by the work of
many scholars working from different approaches and on different
problems. Almost every important point has been challenged in
one way or another. 1 All arguments concerning politics during
1 Recent revisionist writings on eighteenth-century America are voluminous.
The main points of reinterpretation will be found in the following books and
articles, to which specific reference is made in the paragraphs that follow:
Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massa¬
chusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955); E. James Ferguson, “Currency
280 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the prerevolutionary years have been affected by an exhaustive
demonstration for one colony, which might well be duplicated for
others, that the franchise, far from having been restricted in
behalf of a borough-mongering aristocracy, was widely available
for popular use. Indeed, it was more widespread than the desire
to use it—a fact which in itself calls into question a whole range
of traditional arguments and assumptions. Similarly, the Populist
terms in which economic elements of prerevolutionary history
have most often been discussed may no longer be used with the
same confidence. For it has been shown that paper money, long
believed to have been the inflationary instrument of a depressed
and desperate debtor yeomanry, was in general a fiscally sound
and successful means—whether issued directly by the govern¬
ments or through land banks—not only of providing a medium of
exchange but also of creating sources of credit necessary for the
growth of an underdeveloped economy and a stable system of
public finance for otherwise resourceless governments. Merchants
and creditors commonly supported the issuance of paper, and
many of the debtors who did so turn out to have been substantial
property owners.
Equally, the key writings extending the interpretation into the
revolutionary years have come under question. The first and still
classic monograph detailing the inner social struggle of the
decade before 1776—Carl Becker's History of Political Parties in
Finance: An Interpretation of Colonial Monetary Practices,” William and
Mary Quarterly, X (April, 1953), 153-180; Theodore Thayer, 'The Land
Bank System in the American Colonies,” Journal of Economic History, XIII
(Spring, 1953), 145—159; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America
from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, N. J., 1957); George A.
Billias, The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740 (Orono, Me., 1959); Milton
M. Klein, ‘‘Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York,” New York History
XL (July, 1959), 221-246; Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, “Radicals and Con¬
servatives in Massachusetts after Independence,” New England Quarterly,
XVII (September, 1944), 343-355; Bernard Bailyn, “The Blount Papers:
Notes on the Merchant ‘Class' in the Revolutionary Period,” William and
Mary Quarterly, XI (January, 1954), 98-104; Frederick B. Tolies, “The
American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Re-Evaluation,”
American Historical Review, LX (October, 1954), 1-12; Robert E. Brown,
Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of “An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution” (Princeton, N. J., 1956); Forrest Mc¬
Donald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago,
1958); Daniel J. Boors tin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953),
and The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958). References
to other writings and other viewpoints will be found in Edmund S. Morgan.
“The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising,” William and
Mary Quarterly, XIV (January, 1957), 3-15; and Richard B. Morris, “The
Confederation Period and the American Historian,” ibid., XIII (April, 1956)
1QQ 1 ere N * 9 ' 5
BERNARD BAILYN 281
the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (1909)—has been subjected
to sharp criticism on points of validation and consistency. And,
because Becker’s book, like other studies of the movement toward
revolution, rests upon a belief in the continuity of “radical” and
“conservative” groupings, it has been weakened by an analysis
proving such terminology to be deceptive in that it f ails to define
consistently identifiable groups of people. Similarly, the “class”
characteristic of the merchant group in the northern colonies, a
presupposition of important studies of the merchants in the revo¬
lutionary movement, has been questioned, and along with it the
belief that there was an economic or occupational basis for posi¬
tions taken on the revolutionary controversy. More important, a
recent survey of the writings following up J. F. Jameson’s classic
essay, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement
(1926), has shown how little has been written in the last twenty-
five years to substantiate that famous statement of the Revolution
as a movement of social reform. Most dramatic of all has been
the demolition of Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution (1913), which stood solidly for over forty years as
the central pillar of the counterrevolution argument: the idea,
that is, that the Constitution was a “conservative” document, the
polar opposite of the “radical” Articles of Confederation, embody¬
ing the interests and desires of public creditors and other moneyed
conservatives, and marking the Thermidorian conclusion to the
enlightened radicalism of the early revolutionary years.
Finally, there are arguments of another sort, assertions to the
effect that not only did Enhghtenment ideas not provoke native
American radicals to undertake serious reform during the Revo¬
lution, but that ideas have never played an important role in
American public life, in the eighteenth century or after, and that
the political "genius” of the American people, during the Revo¬
lution as later, has lain in their brute pragmatism, their successful
resistance to the “distant example and teachings of the European
Enlightenment,” the maunderings of “garret-spawned European
illuminati.”
Thus from several directions at once have come evidence and
arguments that cloud if they do not totally obscure the picture
of eighteenth-century American history composed by a generation
of scholars. These recent critical writings are of course of unequal
weight and validity; but few of them are totally unsubstantiated,
almost all of them have some point and substance, and taken
together they are sufficient to raise serious doubts about the
organization of thought within which we have become accus-
282 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tomed to view the eighteenth century. A full reconsideration of
the problems raised by these findings and ideas would of course
be out of the question here even if sufficient facts were now
available. But one might make at least an approach to the task
and a first approximation to some answers to the problems by
isolating the central premise concerning the relationship between
Enlightenment ideas and political experience and reconsidering
it in view of the evidence that is now available.
Considering the material at hand, old and new, that bears on
this question, one discovers an apparent paradox. There appear
to be two primary and contradictory sets of facts. The first and
more obvious is the undeniable evidence of the seriousness with
which colonial and revolutionary leaders took ideas, and the de¬
liberateness of their efforts during the Revolution to reshape
institutions in their pattern. The more we know about these
American provincials the clearer it is that among them were
remarkably well-informed students of contemporary social and
political theory. There never was a dark age that destroyed the
cultural contacts between Europe and America. The sources of
transmission had been numerous in the seventeenth century; they
increased in the eighteenth. There were not only the impersonal
agencies of newspapers, books, and pamphlets, but also contin¬
uous personal contact through travel and correspondence. Above
all, there were Pan-Atlantic, mainly Anglo-American, interest
groups that occasioned a continuous flow of fresh information
and ideas between Europe and the mainland colonies in America.
Of these, the most important were the English dissenters and
their numerous codenominationalists in America. Located perforce
on the left of the English political spectrum, acutely alive to
ideas of reform that might increase their security in England,
they were, for the almost endemically nonconformist colonists, a
rich source of political and social theory. It was largely through
nonconformist connections, as Caroline Robbins’ recent book,
The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959), suggests,
that the commonwealth radicalism of seventeenth-century Eng¬
land continued to flow to the colonists, blending, ultimately, with
other strains of thought to form a common body of advanced
theory.
In every colony and in every legislature there were people who
knew Locke and Beccaria, Montesquieu and Voltaire; but per¬
haps more important, there was in every village of every colony
someone who knew such transmitters of English nonconformist
BERNARD BAILYN 283
thought as Watts, Neal, and Burgh; later Priestley and Price—
lesser writers, no doubt, but staunch opponents of traditional
authority, and they spoke in a familiar idiom. In the bitterly
contentious pamphlet literature of mid-eighteenth-century Ameri¬
can politics, the most frequently cited authority on matters of
principle and theory was not Locke or Montesquieu but Cato's
Letters, a series of radically libertarian essays written in London
in 1720—1723 by two supporters of the dissenting interest, John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Through such writers, as well
as through the major authors, leading colonists kept contact with
a powerful tradition of enlightened thought.
This body of doctrine fell naturally into play in the controversy
over the power of the imperial government. For the revolutionary
leaders it supplied a common vocabulary and a common pattern
of thought, and, when the time came, common principles of
political reform. That reform was sought and seriously if unevenly
undertaken, there can be no doubt. Institutions were remodeled,
laws altered, practices questioned all in accordance with advanced
doctrine on the nature of liberty and of the institutions needed to
achieve it. The Americans were acutely aware of being inno¬
vators, of bringing mankind a long step forward. They believed
that they had so far succeeded in their effort to reshape circum¬
stances to conform to enlightened ideas and ideals that they had
introduced a new era in human affairs. And they were supported
in this by the opinion of informed thinkers in Europe. The con¬
temporary image of the American Revolution at home and abroad
was complex; but no one doubted that a revolution that threatened
the existing order and portended new social and political arrange¬
ments had been made, and made in the name of reason.
Thus, throughout the eighteenth century there were prominent,
politically active Americans who were well aware of the develop¬
ment of European thinking, took ideas seriously, and during the
Revolution deliberately used them in an effort to reform the in¬
stitutional basis of society. This much seems obvious. But, para¬
doxically, and less obviously, it is equally true that many, indeed
most, of what these leaders considered to be their greatest achieve¬
ments during the Revolution—reforms that made America seem
to half the world like the veritable heavenly city of the eighteenth-
century philosophers—had been matters of fact before they were
matters of theory and revolutionary doctrine.
No reform in the entire Revolution appeared of greater im¬
portance to Jefferson than the Virginia acts abolishing primo¬
geniture and entail. This action, he later wrote, was part of “a
284 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or
future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly
republican.” But primogeniture and entail had never taken deep
roots in America, not even in tidewater Virginia. Where land was
cheap and easily available such legal restrictions proved to be
encumbrances profiting few. Often they tended to threaten rather
than secure the survival of the family, as Jefferson himself real¬
ized when in 1774 he petitioned the Assembly to break an entail
on his wife’s estate on the very practical, untheoretical, and com¬
mon ground that to do so would be “greatly to their [the peti¬
tioners’] Interest and that of their Families.” The legal abolition
of primogeniture and entail during and after the Revolution was
of little material consequence. Their demise had been effectively
decreed years before by the circumstances of life in a wilderness
environment.
Similarly, the disestablishment of religion—a major goal of
revolutionary reform—was carried out, to the extent that it was,
in circumstances so favorable to it that one wonders not how
it was done but why it was not done more thoroughly. There is
no more eloquent, moving testimony to revolutionary idealism
than the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom: it is the
essence of Enlightenment faith. But what did it, and the disestab¬
lishment legislation that had preceded it, reform? What had the
establishment of religion meant in prerevolutionary Virginia? The
Church of England was the state church, but dissent was toler¬
ated well beyond the limits of the English Acts of Toleration. The
law required nonconformist organizations to be licensed by the
government, but dissenters were not barred from their own
worship nor penalized for failure to attend the Anglican com¬
munion, and they were commonly exempted from parish taxes.
Nonconformity excluded no one from voting and only the very
few Catholics from enjoying public office. And when the itineracy
of revivalist preachers led the establishment to contemplate more
restrictive measures, the Baptists and Presbyterians advanced
to the point of arguing publicly, and pragmatically, that the
toleration they had so far enjoyed was an encumbrance, and that
the only proper solution was total liberty: in effect, disestablish¬
ment.
Virginia was if anything more conservative than most colonies.
The legal establishment of the Church of England was in fact
no more rigorous in South Carolina and Georgia: it was con¬
siderably weaker in North Carolina. It hardly existed at all in
the middle colonies (there was of course no vestige of it in
BERNARD BAILYN 285
Pennsylvania), and where it did, as in four counties of New York,
it was either ignored or had become embattled by violent oppo¬
sition well before the Revolution. And in Massachusetts and
Connecticut, where the establishment, being nonconformist ac¬
cording to English law, was legally tenuous to begin with, toler¬
ance in worship and relief from church taxation had been
extended to the major dissenting groups early in the century,
resulting well before the Revolution in what was, in effect if not
in law, a multiple establishment. And this had been further
weakened by the splintering effect of the Great Awakening. Al¬
most everywhere the Church of England, the established church
of the highest state authority, was embattled and defensive—
driven to rely more and more on its missionary arm, the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, to sustain it against the cohorts
of dissent.
None of this had resulted from Enlightenment theory. It had
been created by the mundane exigencies of the situation: by
the distance that separated Americans from ecclesiastical centers
in England and the Continent; by the never-ending need to en¬
courage immigration to the colonies; by the variety, the mere
numbers, of religious groups, each by itself a minority, forced to
live together; and by the weakness of the coercive powers of the
state, its inability to control the social forces within it.
Even more gradual and less contested had been the process
by which government in the colonies had become government
by the consent of the governed. What has been proved about the
franchise in early Massachusetts—that it was open for practically
the entire free adult male population—can be proved to a lesser
or greater extent for all the colonies. But the extraordinary breadth
of the franchise in the American colonies had not resulted from
popular demands: there had been no cries for universal manhood
suffrage, nor were there popular theories claiming, or even justi¬
fying, general participation in politics. Nowhere in eighteenth-
century America was there “democracy”—middle-class or other¬
wise—as we use the term. The main reason for the wide franchise
was that the traditional English laws limiting suffrage to free¬
holders of certain competences proved in the colonies, where
freehold property was almost universal, to be not restrictive but
widely permissive.
Representation would seem to be different, since before the
Revolution complaints had been voiced against the inequity of its
apportioning, especially in the Pennsylvania and North Carolina
assemblies. But these complaints were based on an assumption
286 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that would have seemed natural and reasonable almost nowhere
else in the Western world: the assumption that representation
in governing assemblages was a proper and rightful attribute of
people as such—of regular units of population, or of populated
land—rather than the privilege of particular groups, institutions,
or regions. Complaints there were, bitter ones. But they were
complaints claiming injury and deprivation, not abstract ideals
or unfamiliar desires. They assumed from common experience
the normalcy of regular and systematic representation. And how
should it have been otherwise? The colonial assemblies had not,
like ancient parliaments, grown to satisfy a monarch’s need for
the support of particular groups or individuals or to protect the
interests of a social order, and they had not developed insensibly
from precedent to precedent. They had been created at a stroke,
and they were in their composition necessarily regular and sys¬
tematic. Nor did the process, the character, of representation as
it was known in the colonies derive from theory. For colonial
Americans, representation had none of the symbolic and little of
the purely deliberative qualities which, as a result of the revolu¬
tionary debases and of Burke’s speeches, would become celebrated
as "virtual.” To the colonists it was direct and actual: it was,
most often, a kind of agency, a delegation of powers, to indi¬
viduals commonly required to be residents of their constituencies
and, often, bound by instructions from them—with the result
that eighteenth-century American legislatures frequently resem¬
bled, in spirit if not otherwise, those "ancient assemblies” of
New York, composed, the contemporary historian William Smith
wrote, "of plain, illiterate husbandmen, whose views seldom ex¬
tended farther than to the regulation of highways, the destruction
of wolves, wild cats, and foxes, and the advancement of the
other little interests of the particular counties which they were
chosen to represent.” There was no theoretical basis for such
direct and actual representation. It had been created and was
continuously reinforced by the pressure of local politics in the
colonies and by the political circumstances in England, to which
the colonists had found it necessary to send closely instructed,
paid representatives—agents, so called—from the very beginning.
But franchise and representation are mere mechanisms of
government by consent. At its heart lies freedom from executive
power, from the independent action of state authority, and the
concentration of power in representative bodies and elected offi¬
cials. The greatest achievement of the Revolution was of course
the repudiation of just such state authority and the transfer of
BERNARD BAIBYN 287
power to popular legislatures. No one will deny that this action
was taken in accordance with the highest principles of Enlighten¬
ment theory. But the way had been paved by fifty years of grind¬
ing factionalism in colonial politics. In the details of prerevolu¬
tionary American politics, in the complicated maneuverings of
provincial politicians seeking the benefits of government, in the
patterns of local patronage and the forms of factional groupings,
there lies a history of progressive alienation from the state which
resulted, at least by the 1750’s, in what Professor Robert Palmer
has lucidly described as a revolutionary situation: a condition
... in which confidence in the justice or reasonableness of existing
authority is undermined; where old loyalties fade, obligations are felt
as impositions, law seems arbitrary, and respect for superiors is felt
as a form of humiliation; where existing sources of prestige seem
undeserved . . . and government is sensed as distant, apart from the
governed and not really “representing” them.
Such a situation had developed in mid-eighteenth-century Amer¬
ica, not from theories of government or Enlightenment ideas but
from the factional opposition that had grown up against a suc¬
cession of legally powerful, but often cynically self-seeking, inept,
and above all politically weak officers of state.
Surrounding all of these circumstances and in various ways
controlling them is the fact that that great goal of the European
revolutions of the late eighteenth century, equality of status before
the law—the abolition of legal privilege—had been reached al¬
most everywhere in the American colonies at least by the early
years of the eighteenth century. Analogies between the upper
strata of colonial society and the European aristocrats are mis¬
leading. Social stratification existed, of course; but the difference
between aristocracies in eighteenth-century Europe and in Amer¬
ica are more important than the s imil arities. So far was legal
privilege, or even distinction, absent in the colonies that where it
existed it was an open sore of festering discontent, leading not
merely, as in the case of the Penn family’s hereditary claims to
tax exemption, to formal protests, but, as in the case of the
powers enjoyed by the Hudson River land magnates, to violent
opposition as well. More important, the colonial aristocracy, such
as it was, had no formal, institutional role in government. No
public office or function was legally a prerogative of birth. As
there were no social orders in the eyes of the law, so there were
no governmental bodies to represent them. The only claim that
has been made to the contrary is that, in effect, the governors’
288 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Councils constituted political institutions in the service of the
aristocracy. But this claim—of dubious value in any case because
of the steadily declining political importance of the Councils in
the eighteenth century—cannot be substantiated. It is true that
certain families tended to dominate the Councils, but they had
less legal claim to places in those bodies than certain royal offi¬
cials who, though hardly members of an American aristocracy, sat
on the Councils by virtue of their office. Councilors could be and
were removed by simple political maneuver. Council seats were
filled either by appointment or election: when appointive, they
were vulnerable to political pressure in England; when elective, to
the vagaries of public opinion at home. Thus on the one hand it
took William Byrd II three years of maneuvering in London to
get himself appointed to the seat on the Virginia Council vacated
by his father’s death in 1704, and on the other, when in 1766 the
Hutchinson faction’s control of the Massachusetts Council proved
unpopular, it was simply removed wholesale by being voted out of
office at the next election. As there were no special privileges, no
peculiar group possessions, manners, or attitudes to distinguish
councilors from other affluent Americans, so there were no sepa¬
rate political interests expressed in the Councils as such. Counci¬
lors joined as directly as others in the factional disputes of the
time, associating with groups of all sorts, from minute and trans¬
ient American opposition parties to massive English-centered po¬
litical syndicates. A century before the Revolution and not as the
result of anti-aristocratic ideas, the colonial aristocracy had be¬
come a vaguely defined, fluid group whose power—in no way
guaranteed, buttressed, or even recognized in law—was competi¬
tively maintained and dependent on continuous, popular support.
Other examples could be given. Were written constitutions felt
to be particular guarantees of liberty in enlightened states? Amer¬
icans had known them in the form of colonial charters and gov¬
ernors’ instructions for a century before the Revolution; and after
1763, seeking a basis for their claims against the constitutionality
of specific acts of Parliament, they had been driven, out of sheer
logical necessity and not out of principle, to generalize that ex¬
perience. But the point is perhaps clear enough. Major attributes
of enlightened polities had developed naturally, spontaneously,
early in the history of the American colonies, and they existed as
simple matters of social and political fact on the eve of the
Revolution.
But if all this is true, what did the Revolution accomplish? Of
BERNARD BAILYN 289
what real significance were the ideals and ideas? What was the
bearing of Enlightenment thought on the political experience of
eighteenth-century Americans?
Perhaps this much may be said. What had evolved spontane¬
ously from the demands of place and time was not self-justifying,
nor was it universally welcomed. New developments, however
gradual, were suspect by some, resisted in part, and confined in
their effects. If it was true that the establishment of religion was
everywhere weak in the colonies and that in some places it was
even difficult to know what was orthodoxy and what was not, it
was nevertheless also true that faith in the idea of orthodoxy per¬
sisted and with it belief in the propriety of a privileged state re¬
ligion. If, as a matter of fact, the spread of freehold tenure quali¬
fied large populations for voting, it did not create new reasons for
using that power nor make the victims of its use content with
what, in terms of the dominant ideal of balance in the state,
seemed a disproportionate influence of “the democracy.” If many
colonists came naturally to assume that representation should be
direct and actual, growing with the population and bearing some
relation to its distribution, crown officials did not, and they had
the weight of precedent and theory as well as of authority with
them and hence justification for resistance. If state authority was
seen increasingly as alien and hostile and was forced to fight for
survival within an abrasive, kaleidoscopic factionalism, the tradi¬
tional idea nevertheless persisted that the common good was some¬
how defined by the state and that political parties or factions—
organized opposition to established government—were seditious.
A traditional aristocracy did not in fact exist; but the assumption
that superiority was indivisible, that social eminence and political
influence had a natural affinity to each other, did. The colonists
instinctively conceded to the claims of the well-born and rich to
exercise public office, and in this sense politics remained aristo¬
cratic. Behavior had changed—had had to change—with the cir¬
cumstances of everyday life; but habits of mind and the sense of
rightness lagged behind. Many felt the changes to be away from,
not toward, something: that they represented deviance; that they
lacked, in a word, legitimacy.
This divergence between habits of mind and belief on the one
hand and experience and behavior on the other was ended at the
Revolution. A rebellion that destroyed the traditional sources of
public authority called forth the full range of advanced ideas.
Long-settled attitudes were jolted and loosened. The grounds of
legitimacy suddenly shifted. What had happened was seen to
290 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
have been good and proper, steps In the right direction. The glass
was half full, not half empty; and to complete the work of fate
and nature, further thought must be taken, theories tested, ideas
applied. Precisely because so many social and institutional reforms
had already taken place in America, the revolutionary movement
there, more than elsewhere, was a matter of doctrine, ideas, and
comprehension.
And so it remained. Social change and social conflict of course
took place during the revolutionary years; but the essential de¬
velopments of the period lay elsewhere, in the effort to think
through and to apply under the most favorable, permissive, cir¬
cumstances enlightened ideas of government and society. The
problems were many, often unexpected and difficult; some were
only gradually perceived. Social and personal privilege, for ex¬
ample, could easily be eliminated—it hardly existed; but what of
the impersonal privileges of corporate bodies? Legal orders and
ranks within society could be outlawed without creating the
slightest tremor, and executive power with equal ease subordinated
to the legislative: but how was balance within a polity to be
achieved? What were the elements to be balanced and how were
they to be separated? It was not even necessary formally to abolish
the interest of state as a symbol and determinant of the common
good; it was simply dissolved: but what was left to keep clashing
factions from tearing a government apart? The problems were
pressing, and the efforts to solve them mark the stages of revolu¬
tionary history.
In behalf of Enlightenment liberalism the revolutionary leaders
undertook to complete, formalize, systematize and symbolize what
previously had been only partially realized, confused, and disputed
matters of fact. Enlightenment ideas were not instruments of a
particular social group, nor did they destroy a social order. They
did not create new social and political forces in America. They re¬
leased those that had long existed, and vastly increased their
power. This completion, this rationalization, this symbolization,
this lifting into consciousness and endowing with high moral pur¬
pose inchoate, confused elements of social and political change—
this was the American Revolution.
CECELIA M. KENYON 2QI
Republicanism and Radicalism
in the American Revolution:
An Old-Fashioned Interpretation
CECELIA M. KENYON
I
Although the American Revolution was a central and decisive
phenomenon in the national life of the American people, taken
comfortably for granted by its heirs and nominally commemorated
by a convenient summer holiday, its nature and significance con¬
tinue to puzzle historians who seek to know it well. From the very
beginning, it was believed by those who participated in it—on the
western side of the Atlantic—to be a quite remarkable event, not
merely because it was their revolution, but because it seemed to
them to introduce a new phase in the political evolution of man¬
kind, and therefore to be touched with universal significance. This
native estimate was not entirely parochial. There was considerable
interest in the American experiment among contemporary Euro¬
peans, and the volumes of commentary written by visitors in the
nineteenth century indicate that this interest was not merely
ephemeral. In more recent times, Americans have been reminded
of their Revolutionary heritage by later rebels against colonial
rule, who have sometimes seemed to find the America of 1776
more inspiring than the America of 1962. Thus the Revolution
was, and continues to be, an event of enduring importance. And
yet, in spite of generations of study, its essential nature remains
obscure. In fact, as its two-hundredth anniversary approaches,
there seems to be more uncertainty about its meaning, more di¬
versity in interpretation, than ever before. For the last two genera¬
tions, scholars have debated such questions as the relationship
between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,
what the real causes of the Revolution were, whether it was essen-
Reprinted with permission from The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.,
XIX (April, 1962), 153—182 and the Institute of Early American History and
Culture.
Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Seminar
on the American Revolution, sponsored by Colonial Williamsburg, Inc.,
Williamsburg, Virginia, September 9, 1960.
292 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tially a colonial revolt or an internal struggle for power, whether
it was radical or conservative—indeed, whether, in fact, it was
actually a revolution. Among these and other issues, a crucial one
over which there has been much confusion is whether the Revo¬
lution was radical or conservative. The purpose of this article is
to consider some of the intellectual forces which have contributed
to this confusion, to suggest a way by which some of this confusion
may be resolved, and to analyze the Revolution with respect to its
radical and conservative immediate aspects and long-range im¬
plications.
II
Among the factors responsible for this confusion, one of the
most important is sheer lack of accurate and precise knowledge.
Not until very recently, for example, have we really known much
about the suffrage or about actual participation in politics. 1 It has
taken nearly two centuries for historians to leam the historio¬
graphical lessons implicit in Madison’s Tenth Federalist and to
begin to dig out the extraordinarily complex interest groups in¬
volved in the ratification of the Constitution. 2 As more knowledge
accumulates, so should our understanding of the total Revolu¬
tionary situation increase in both depth and breadth.
Yet the facts do not reveal themselves spontaneously, nor do
they always speak for themselves. A second factor which has con¬
tributed to confusion has been the attempt to impose upon the
Revolution too simple a pattern of interpretation. It is natural and
inevitable for historians and political scientists to fit the ideas, the
institutions, the political, social, and economic developments of
the period into a unified and coherent whole. No mere lis ting of
these elements, without classification and an effort to see their
various interrelationships, would be intelligible. The hazard of this
process of intellectual construction is as natural and familiar as
See, for example, Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the
Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955); Richard P.
McCormick, Experiment in Independence: New Jersey in the Critical Period
1781-1789 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1950), and The History of Voting in New
Jersey . . . (New Brunswick, N. J., 1953); J. R. Pole, "Suffrage Reform and
the American Revo lution in New Jersey," New Jersey Historical Society,
Proceedings, LXXIV (Newark, 1956), 173-194; "Suffrage and Representa-
^S^ ^ S a^5?) ttS 560^5^2 tiStiCal N ° te ” William and Mar y Quarterly,
* r °55S s ! : McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Con¬
stitution (Chicago, 1958), esp. iv.
CECELIA M. KENYON 293
the process itself. It is that the pattern may distort reality even as
it illuminates it. Such has been the result of the inclination to view
the conflicts and debates of the Revolution as if the parties to them
were divided naturally into pairs of opposites. We speak of the
American and British position, of Loyalists and Patriots, of radi¬
cals and conservatives, of democrats and aristocrats, of Federalists
and Anti-Federalists. There is much validity in this categorization,
because there were times during the period between 1765 and
1789 when the alternative choices of action were reduced to two:
one did or did not sign the Declaration of Independence; one
voted for or against the Constitution of 1787. Furthermore, there
was some degree of consistency and continuity in the positions
taken by various men over an extended period of time. Yet I be¬
lieve that it is a mistake to see the Revolution from its early stages
to its later ones as a movement involving issues over which men
divided naturally into two clearly defined groups, radical and
conservative, more or less constant in composition.
Among the intellectual forces which have operated to incline
American historians toward this dichotomous analysis of the Revo¬
lutionary period are two, one conscious, one perhaps unconscious.
The first is that inspired by the Populist critique of the Constitu¬
tion during the 1890's, and later elaborated into a full-blown
interpretation according to which the Declaration of Independence
represented and embodied the spirit of democracy which charac¬
terized the early stages of the Revolution, while the Constitution
was the product of a successful conservative and antidemocratic
reaction. 3 Charles A. Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Con¬
stitution* was not identical with this interpretation, but it tended
to absorb and reinforce it by seeming to present impressive evi¬
dence for its validity. An economic interpretation does not neces¬
sarily have to be dichotomous, but Beard’s was, and it was Beard
who exercised a dominant influence over more than a generation
of American historians. Why Beard and his followers should have
accepted a Hamiltonian rather than a Madisonian view of politics
is not easy to explain, but the results of this acceptance do seem
reasonably clear. It has exercised an enormous influence both in
the selection and interpretation of facts, and has tended to create
a simplified pattern to describe and explain what was in reality a
very complex set of political phenomena.
3 See C. Edward Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New
York and London, 1903), and J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Gov¬
ernment . . . (New York, 1907).
^Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the
United States (New York, 1913).
294 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
This historiographical factor has probably been reinforced by
a second one, much less visible, and probably impossible to docu¬
ment. It is the unconscious conditioning effect on Americans of a
two-party political system. Only twice within a century has a third
party threatened the dominance of the two major parties, and
each was strictly a one-shot flash never repeated. To be sure, each
of the major parties has its internal cleavages, of which informed
students of politics as well as politicians are well aware. Still,
Americans do think of politics in terms of two parties, and this
conception, I suspect, has had its influence on the way in which
we visualize our past. A dualistic party system seems to us so
normal that we tend to think of it as part of a natural political
order.
It was not so for the men of the Revolution. We do not yet have
sufficient evidence to know to what extent their aversion to parties
was negated by their tendency to form and use them. The attitude
of the most articulate spokesmen is unequivocal and unmistakable,
and it appears to have been rather pervasive. As such, it was itself
a factor in Revolutionary politics and must be taken into consid¬
eration. What I am proposing is that in analyzing the Revolution,
we adopt something of the intellectual habit of its makers and
consider the implications of their dislike and distrust of parties.
One such implication is obvious; they thought of parties as reflect¬
ing or magnifying selfish interests. Another is equally obvious and
for our purposes perhaps more significant. Their ideal of politics
appears to have involved not the division of the body of citizens
into more or less permanent groupings held together by similar
views on a composite cluster of principles and/or interests, but
rather ex tempore majorities and minorities formed by the issue of
the moment and undistorted by pre-existing organization not
related to the instant issue. This ideal was matched and perhaps
countered by a recognition of economic and other factors which
tended to divide society into relatively stable, though not neces¬
sarily politically organized or active, groups, whose influence
might, nonetheless, be felt in politics. Some of the new constitu-
tions adopted during the period specifically recognized an eco¬
nomic class division in their property qualifications for office¬
holding. Similarly, in several of the states, and certainly in the
national debate of 1787—1788, there was present an awareness of
two major classes, and it was assumed by both sides that these
classes would sometimes have different economic and political in¬
terests. At the same time, the pre-Revolutionary arguments against
the British theory of virtual representation, and the later debates
CECELIA M. KENYON
over the ratification of the Constitution, expressed the necessity
of making the representative assembly reflect a multiplicity of
interests and opinions among the voters rather than a duaMstic
division along party or factional lines. Thus it seems quite clear
that the Americans of the Revolutionary period did not have a
consistent, systematic theory of the political process, and especially
not of political parties. It seems a safe hypothesis to suggest that
in this respect there would very likely be a reciprocal relationship
between political thought and political behavior. We should not
read the pattern of later political divisions back into the eighteenth
century, any more than we should read their substance.
It would be remarkable indeed if a simple dichotomous pattern
could really fit so complex a phenomenon as the Revolution. It
was, as revolutions go, a rather peculiar one. In the first place,
no revolution was intended; the colonists wanted merely a redress
of grievances as British subjects and had no plans either for in¬
dependence or for the formation of republican government. In the
second place, there were thirteen separate colonies or states in¬
volved, and, though they may not have been as different from one
another as their members believed them to be, the differences
were sufficient to make the impact and the aftermath of the Revo¬
lution far from identical in each of them. In the third place, the
Revolution was both the creator of and the fruit of the emergence
of first a growing consciousness that the British continental colo¬
nies constituted a separate community with interests different
from those of the mother country and later a spirit of nationalism
and eventually of national unity. In the fourth place, the Revolu¬
tion was accomplished with remarkably little internal coercion and
remarkably great decentralization of leadership. No central com¬
mittee, party, government, or army ever possessed or exercised a
preponderance either of power or authority at any time during
the period from 1765 to 1789. In short, Americans found them¬
selves in 1776 in a position for which they were not prepared and
for which they had no plans. When the decision for independence
was taken, they had been in armed revolt for over a year and,
during this period, had been living either without formal, rec¬
ognized governments or with governments of dubious legitimacy
and authority. It is necessary to understand this combination of a
complex situation and complex political attitudes before proceed¬
ing to an analysis of republicanism and radicalism during the
American Revolution.
A third factor contributing to the confusion over the nature of
the Revolution has been our inability to achieve a precise and
296 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
meaningful terininology with which to analyze and categorize the
phenomena we have sought to describe. There has been no gen¬
eral agreement among scholars about the meaning of words such
as radical, conservative, liberal, or democratic, and there has been
a notable lack of rigor in the way we have applied them to the
Revolutionary era. In particular, I would object that the common
use of the terms radical and conservative to denote respectively
populist and anti-populist divisions within the Revolutionary party
has tended to obscure the nature of the changes which took place
in America during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
There are several major difficulties involved in an identification
of democratic and radical. In the first place, the word democratic
is too loose. It is not easy to get a precise yardstick for democracy
in the Revolutionary period, or to find among the articulate men
of the age one whose views were purely and consistently demo¬
cratic by any standard. Benjamin Franklin, for example, is usually
associated with the radical democrats of Pennsylvania because he
was a believer in unicameralism. In the Philadelphia Convention,
Franklin was opposed to a salary in excess of expenses for the
President, and this arrangement in effect would have restricted
that office to the relatively wealthy. James Wilson and Gouveneur
Morris both advocated the direct, popular election of the President
—on its face a radically democratic proposal—but neither was
identified with the populist party in his state, and Morris was
very closely associated with Alexander Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson
devised a comprehensive plan of reform for the state of Virginia,
aimed, as he said, at uprooting the last remnants of aristocracy
there. But Jefferson was a staunch believer in separation of powers
and therefore can scarcely qualify as a democrat for those who
tend to identify democracy with the absence of separation of
powers or the concentration of power in the legislative branch
of the government. Similarly, Jefferson's objections to the Consti¬
tution of 1787 did not touch the distribution of powers between the
central government and the states, and he cannot therefore fit into
the association of democracy with localism. In short, the identifi¬
cation of radicalism with democracy or localism fails to provide
a clear and precise definition as a tool for analyzing the Revolution.
In the second place, such an identification involves a chain of
assumptions of dubious validity. The definition of radical in terms
of democracy assumes that the latter was the central issue of the
period, that it operated as a primary determinative force in lining
up men on other issues which were derivative from it and which
were therefore of secondary importance, that its effect, in short.
CECELIA M. KENYON 297
was to produce a polarization of opinion. Was democracy an ideo¬
logical and dynamic force which operated in this manner? I think
not, or at least not consistently. For example, the separation of
church and state was a fundamental change. If democracy and
radicalism were identical, then the more democratic party should
have been in favor of this separation. The opposition to the clause
in the Constitution which prohibited religious tests for officeholding
suggests that such was not the case. The legal effect of this clause
was to establish equality of eligibility for all men, regardless of
their religious or nonreligious beliefs or associations. It also, by
implication, broadened the potential choice of the electorate, in
comparison with the situation in a number of the state govern¬
ments. In other words, it prohibited a religious monopoly of office¬
holding, and it prohibited restraints on the free choice of the elec¬
torate. These factors are frequently associated with democratic
government, yet they were not desired by some of the opponents of
the Constitution who criticized that document, on other grounds,
as having an aristocratic bias. I submit that these opponents were
not democratic on this issue and that the association of radicalism
with Revolutionary democracy assumes a unity, consistency, and
rationality in political thought which is rarely found even in the
most sophisticated and systematic of theorists.
This is not to deny that the association of radical with demo -
erotic has considerable historical justification. In America, as
elsewhere, one element of political evolution in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries was the extension of power and privilege
to the majority of the population. With respect to this element, the
populist parties of the Revolution may be called radical, though
the recent studies of the suffrage requirements indicate that re¬
formist would be more accurate. There were other movements,
however, in the direction of nationalism, of individualism, of in-
dustralization that were certainly in the literal sense radical,
though none of them was by necessary and exclusive logic con¬
nected with democracy. In fact, the advocates of nationalism and
industrialism during the last quarter of the eighteenth century in
America were frequently in opposition to the advocates of populism
and/or democracy. If one accepts the identification of radicalism
with the latter, then it would seem to follow that nationalism and
industralism were conservative movements. Put in these general
terms, this sounds like a ridiculous conclusion, for both were to
become major movements of the nineteenth and twentieth cen¬
turies, both produced radical changes, and both have been called
“revolutions/* Similarly, we are accustomed to having the Consti-
298 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tution described as the product of a conservative reaction, al¬
though it was unquestionably a great step in the direction of na¬
tionalism. Hamilton’s financial program had industrialization as
one of its purposes, and, though there are probably few historians
who would call him a conservative on this particular matter, there
is still considerable reluctance to associate him with Revolutionary
radicalism. It is men like Thomas Paine and the authors of the
Pennsylvania constitution whom that term is more likely to bring
to mind. The tendency to define radical purely in terms of populist
groups makes it difficult to classify changes which were funda¬
mental but not overtly or immediately democratic. If we are to
continue to accept this kind of terminology, then we must recog¬
nize that it is a very parochial kind of history we write, one which
foreign students of America must find difficult to translate into
terms which are meaningful to them. And we must recognize that
such terminology does not lend itself to precise comparative and
analytical studies.
A third major difficulty stemming from the identification of
radicalism and democracy is that it inhibits a precise analysis of
the issues which arose during the period and of the groups who
divided over them. Once a group is labeled democratic or radical
on one issue, there is a tendency to assume that whatever stand
it took on others was also democratic or radical. Conversely / once
a particular policy is associated with a democratic or radical
group, it may take on the coloring of that group. Both tendencies
may result in distortion, confusion, or a limited presentation of
reality. Consider the latter, with respect to the issue of paper
money. There must be thousands of graduates of American his¬
tory courses who associate paper money during the Revolution
with radicalism, and radicalism with the demos. Yet it is perfectly
clear that paper money was supported in some states by the
upper classes also. Were the South Carolina planters who sup¬
ported paper money radicals and democrats? Or was paper money
radical only when supported by some groups and opposed by
others? Radical in Rhode Island but not in South Carolina? The
former tendency, the labeling of ideas and institutions in terms of
the assumed character of their advocates or opponents, makes ob¬
jective analysis and comparison awkward if not impossible.
Two examples may serve to make this difficulty clear. It has
been a common interpretation of the Revolutionary period to as¬
sociate democracy with opposition to separation of powers and
checks and balances, partly because the Pennsylvania insurgents
of 1776 were a populist group who seized power from a former
CECELIA M. KENYON 2Q9
privileged group and who then established a constitution which
did not follow the principle of separation of powers. If this and
other similar groups opposed this principle and favored instead a
concentration of authority in the legislature, then the latter form
must be democratic and the former not. But if this categorization
is accepted, then how are we to describe the changes which took
place in state constitutions in the period from about 1820 to
1860? An almost universal trend was the creation of an inde¬
pendent executive, popularly elected; the election of other admin¬
istrative officers was also common and, to a lesser extent, so was
the election of judges. These changes were made partly in the
name of democracy, and we are familiar with them under the
label of the ‘long ballot.” It is perfectly obvious, though not so
frequently noted, that they meant a relative decrease in the au¬
thority of the legislature and—especially the independent execu¬
tive—an increase in separation of powers. Were these later con¬
stitutions, then, antidemocratic, or at least less democratic than
those of the Revolutionary period which did not have an executive
independent of the legislature, elected directly by the people? Such
a conclusion is certainly possible, but it does involve difficulties.
One of them is that not only have our state and federal constitu¬
tions continued to be undemocratic, but that there has been no
substantial popular demand to have them otherwise. The funda¬
mental methodological point is that a definition of radical in terms
of Revolutionary democracy does not provide an adequate tool
for comparative analysis of ideas and institutions during different
periods in our own political evolution, or of similar ones in differ¬
ent countries. For that, we need a more objective and less relativ¬
istic concept.
My second example illustrates another facet of the same need.
The Constitution of 1787 was opposed by groups who have been
commonly regarded as more democratic than its advocates, and
this interpretation has been partly responsible for the opinion that
the Constitution itself was undemocratic. One specific argument
against ratification was that the proposed system of representation
would prejudice the election of men of "the people” and that the
lower house of the national legislature would not truly represent
the people. In short, the Constitution, even in its then most demo¬
cratic feature, would not really be democratic at all. Are we to
accept this contemporary opinion and conclude that the Constitu¬
tion was undemocratic in this most fundamental and simple re¬
spect? The reasoning back of this opinion was the belief that large
constituencies would necessitate pre-election organization and that
300 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the organized electoral majority would not return a legislative
majority which faithfully reflected the real, unorganized constitu¬
ent majority. If we accept the reasoning and the conclusions of
the Anti-Federalists on this point, then we must conclude that
the House of Representatives is not and has never been demo¬
cratic; that the Senate, since the Seventeenth Amendment, has
been even less democratic (since the constituencies of Senators are
entire states); and that the Presidency (with the entire nation as
its constituency) is and has been least democratic of all. If the
two-thirds of our government which is constituted by popular
election is not democratic, then it must of course follow that the
United States is not a democracy, has never been one since 1789,
and can never be one. Again, this is a perfectly possible and rea¬
sonable conclusion. But I do not think that it is a very useful one.
We ought not to accept as historiographical tools the opinions of
Revolutionary polemicists. The prediction of the Anti-Federalists
on this particular point, even in terms of their own conception of
democracy, may have been wrong; the election of 1800 suggests
the distinct possibility that it was. More importantly, their concep¬
tion of democracy may be one which cannot be appropriately ap¬
plied to the study of the whole range of American history. If
Revolutionary democracy has these limitations as a definitional
tool, then surely it is folly to define radical by associating it with
this democracy.
It is for this reason that I have chosen to use the term radical
in its strict and formal sense, unassociated with any substantive
concept such as democracy, majoritarianism, unicameralism, or
localism. Similarly, I would use the term conservative in a com¬
parable sense, to refer to an attitude, position, tendency, or policy
involving or favoring preservation or continuation of some ele¬
ment or elements in the existing situation, but not identifying it
exclusively with any of those elements. The Revolution was not a
monolithic or even a dualistic affair. It precipitated the one great
creative period in the political and constitutional history of the
United States, and its ramifications were not limited to the single
theme of more or less democratization of political structure. It was
a pluralistic phenomenon involving different sectors of change.
Men and groups might be opposed to some changes and in favor
of others. Men who were in favor of democracy in the sense of
majority rule were not always in favor of such liberal and indi¬
vidualistic measures as complete freedom of religion. Men who
sided with what appeared to be the populist party on some issues
CECELIA M. KENYON 30 I
did not do so on others. Men who joined together on some particu¬
lar issue, such as adoption or rejection of the Constitution, did so
for different reasons and with different motives. In order to
analyze all of these issues and their interrelationships, we need
a terminology which is capable of expressing subtle as well as
gross distinctions, nonsubstantive as well as substantive concepts.
Thus I would use radical to indicate a fundamental change; demo¬
cratic to denote a political system in which authority is derived
from the majority of adult inhabitants, all of whom enjoy the suf¬
frage and may use it at regular and reasonably frequent intervals
and all of whom are legally eligible for office; populist to indicate
a more or less self-conscious group, movement, attitude, or achieve¬
ment on behalf of the majority conceived of in terms of the mass
of the people; and liberal to indicate the values of individual
rights, freedom, or happiness. 5 Accordingly, there could be radical
democrats, radical populists, radical liberals, or any combination
of these three substantive positions or their opposites. Similarly,
a man or group can be radical on one issue, conservative on
another. Or a particular policy or set of institutions can be partly
radical, partly conservative. Such a terminology, like many defini¬
tions, reflects the outlook of the user. In this case, it reflects a
conception of the Revolution as composed of pluralistic factors
which do not fall together in a dichotomous pattern. Its parts were
diverse, and its major ideological and institutional results were
eclectic composites. Very few of the ingredients were totally new,
and none of the finished products had that rational symmetry
characteristic of systematic political philosophy. They were the
products of compromise, of adaptation, sometimes of improvisa¬
tion. Nevertheless, the Revolution did shape the future develop¬
ment of American politics and government. It selected and ac¬
centuated certain ingredients in the British and colonial heritage,
rejected others, and made of the whole something that was fun¬
damentally new and different. For all its pluralistic diversity, the
American Revolution was still a revolution, and it was radical.
5 It may be objected that these definitions, especially that of democratic or
democracy , do not correspond to the meanings the words conveyed in
America at the time of the Revolution. I would agree that one should be
aware of contemporary usage. Otherwise the ideas expressed in a given age
will be misunderstood. However, if the historian himself uses words only
and always in their historical sense, he will find it difficult to analyze,
compare, and evaluate different but similar ideas and institutions in dif¬
ferent countries and in different periods. I do not offer the above definitions
as absolutes, but as functional tools for the purposes of analysis and
comparison.
302 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
III
In the later years of their lives, John Adams and Thomas Jef¬
ferson both had occasion to comment on the nature of the Revolu¬
tion, in which each had played a major role. Both left no doubt
that after nearly fifty years they still regarded it, as they had in
the beginning, as the fundamental change in the history of the
American people. Adams emphasized the death of loyalty, affec¬
tion, and allegiance toward the King of England and toward
England itself. “This radical change in the principles, opinions,
sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American
Revolution” 6 Jefferson expressed a hope for the universal realiza¬
tion of the principles of the Declaration of Independence: “May
it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner,
to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to
burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition
had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the bless¬
ings and security of self-government.” 7 Both men were in their
eighties at the time of these remarks, and one may be tempted to
make some allowance for the inclination of old men to exaggerate
the importance of an event which they had helped to bring about.
I am prepared to accept their opinion, and have accordingly
described this article as an old-fashioned interpretation. The
Revolution was radical in its four principal achievements: inde¬
pendence; the establishment of republican government and the
identification of republicanism with political right; the crystalliza¬
tion of the individualism and equalitarianism of the Declaration
of Independence into an operative as well as a formal political
philosophy; the extension of the principle and practice of repub¬
licanism to a large and heterogeneous population by combination
with a new form of federalism.
Of these four results, the first was prior to all the rest and
the one most consciously and immediately felt to be radical. The
decision to declare formal separation from Great Britain was a
difficult one, taken only after a long period of deliberation and
after the colonies had been in armed revolt against the mother
"Letter to Hezekiaii Niles, Feb. 13, 1818, in Adrienne Koch and William
Peden, eds.. The Selected 'Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (New
York, 1946), 204. v
C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed..
The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York and London, 1904-1905),
CECELIA M. KENYON 303
country for more than a year. Nearly three-quarters of the colonists
were of British descent, and the vast majority of these were ac¬
customed to thinking of themselves as Englishmen. Their resist¬
ance to the Stamp Act and subsequent colonial regulations had
not been motivated by a desire for independence, but by a desire
to maintain their rights as Englishmen. Independence was a last
resort, a means to secure these rights as men, and as Americans.
Once accepted as the only means to get what they wanted, the
decision for independence inexorably produced consequences other
than the achievement of their original goal. The United States
developed as an independent nation, not as British colonies nor
as a constituent member of the British Commonwealth. We take
this fact so much for granted today that it is difficult to conceive
of what our political, economic, social, and even geographical de¬
velopment might have been had the colonists achieved their goals
within the Empire, or had the Revolution been unsuccessful. It is
tempting to speculate about the possible “might-have-beens” had
the long years of protest resulted in either of these eventualities.
But the facts are that we did win our independence, and that we
did so with revolutionary violence. Colonial political ideas and
practice had already deviated to some extent from British patterns;
the institution of independent governments widened the gap and
produced a markedly different political tradition.
IV
The most important, as well as the most immediate, change was
the formal establishment of republican governments. Throughout
most of the period of colonial protest, there had been little criticism
of the British constitution or of its aristocratic and monarchical
elements as such. The main thrust of American argument had
been directed toward Parliament rather than the King, and pri¬
marily toward the House of Commons rather than the House of
Lords. It was almost inevitable that Americans would not carry
their arguments further, given the fact that the issue of taxation
was at the heart of colonial opposition. The habitual professions
of allegiance, devotion, and loyalty to their gracious Sovereign
which accompanied colonial petitions, resolutions, and acts of de¬
fiance were both formal and traditional, but they were not com¬
pletely insincere. As long as Americans believed that the crux of
their problem was legislative and not administrative, they could
not but consider Parliament as the central opponent; as long as
304 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
they believed that their aims could be achieved within the Empire,
there was no reason for hostility to the institution of the Crown.
The Americans were not republicans in either a formal or an
ideological sense before 1776. Within a few months, they were,
and have remained so ever since. Once the decision for independ¬
ence was made, there seems to have been no serious question that
any other form of government was either possible or desirable.
Certainly it would have been difficult for all thirteen states to
agree on a single monarch for them all, and the spectacle of
thirteen separate embassies touring Europe and interviewing
prospective candidates suggests that common sense as well as
Common Sense had something to do with the American choice
of republicanism.
This quick transition from monarchy to republic in form and
belief was accomplished with relative ease. The question whether
it was a radical change is difficult to answer. In its actual and
immediate effect on the general poulation, it was not. Almost
from the very beginning, with some exceptions of time and place,
monarchy had rested lightly upon the colonists. George III and
his predecessors were weeks away by sea, and in most of the
colonies most of the time, the royal governors were effectively
limited in the exercise of their authority by the power of the
purse and the difficulty of enforcing unpopular measures in the
face of concerted opposition without adequate and reliable mili¬
tary forces. Above all, there had been the long years of salutary
neglect. It would be too much to say that the American colonies
were autonomous republics before 1776, but their governments
had been far more republican than that of the home country, and
they had long been accustomed to governing themselves with
relatively little interference or assistance from the other side of the
Atlantic. The transition from monarchy to republic did not there-
fore bring with it pervasive and fundamental changes, either in
private or public life. In this sense, the establishment of republi-
can governments was not a radical change, and it is not remark¬
able that it took place so quickly and easily.
What is more remarkable is the rapid shift in attitude and
belief. Within a very short period of time, Americans developed an
ideological attachment to republicanism, and this change was a
radical one, with radical and far-reaching consequences. Before
1776, the prevailing opinion in America had been that the ends
of government—liberty, justice, happiness, and the public good—
could be secured within the framework of monarchy. To be sure,
they meant a li m i t ed or mixed monarchy, and they emphasized
CECELIA M. KENYON 305
the central importance of constitutionalism. Still, they assumed
the compatibility of monarchy with good government. After 1776,
they tended to associate all the characteristics of good government
with republicanism, and with republicanism only. To be sure,
there were dissenters, of whom Alexander Hamilton was the most
illustrious. But the preponderant opinion, the genius, to use Madi¬
sons word, 8 was clear and unambiguous: good government meant
republican government. Thus there emerged an element of rigidity
in American political thinking which has never disappeared and
scarcely, if ever, been relaxed. The idea was so central and so
fixed in the public mind, and the fear and distrust of other forms
of government so great (perhaps inconsistently), that a guarantee
of republican government to each state was written into the Con¬
stitution of 1787. More important, the idea has continued to dom¬
inate the American attitude toward politics and has been an im¬
portant element in the formation of foreign policy. This identifica¬
tion of republican or democratic government with political right
was a change both in substance and in intellectual outlook from
pre-Revolutionary thought, and its consequences have been radical
and far-reaching. Americans have regarded themselves, and have
been regarded, as an essentially pragmatic people, but the prefer¬
ence for republicanism which crystallized at the time of the Revo¬
lution has constituted an ideological, doctrinaire element in their
political outlook which has rarely been questioned. It may also be
suggested that the ideological habit thus acquired has been ex¬
tended to other areas and has become a major factor in American
political thinking. Like republicanism, socialism, imperialism, and
colonialism are all terms which have become stereotypes for
Americans, frequently exercising a powerful ideological force at
odds with our alleged pragmatism.
Thus I would suggest that the actual establishment of repub¬
lican governments in 1776—1780 was not a radical change, but
that its intellectual consequences were. What is puzzling is the
reason for the sudden and virtually complete revolution in atti¬
tude. There was, of course, the influence of Paine’s critique of
monarchy in Common Sense. There was the fact that the potential
8 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist,
Benjamin Fletcher Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961): “The first ques¬
tion that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the govern¬
ment be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be
reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental
principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which
animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on
the capacity of mankind for self-government.” The Thirty-ninth Essay, p. 280.
306 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
counterinfluence of the losing Loyalists was virtually eliminated
by their exodus during and after the war. There was the psy¬
chological necessity in the midst of war for an ideal that would
inspire, sustain, and justify the participants and their actions.
None of these reasons seems quite adequate, but the last was
probably the most important. For the concept of republicanism,
linked with the modified Lockeian ideals of the Declaration of
Independence, provided a truly revolutionary doctrine with uni¬
versal significance. Had the Revolution been merely a fight for
independence, it would have remained a parochial affair of inter¬
est only to Great Britain and possibly to her continental rivals as
convenient material for troublemaking. It was the genius of the
Americans to see this, and once committed, to transform what
might have remained a petty rebellion within the Empire into a
symbol for the liberation of all mankind. Republicanism was an
integral part of the symbol, and both contributed to and drew
strength from it. The Revolution in its origins was a conservative
movement to resist what were believed to be the pernicious inno¬
vations of George III and his Parliament. After 1776 it was, and
was believed to be by its makers, truly radical.
V
The philosophy associated with republicanism and with the
Revolution was also radical. It was the philosophy drawn from
Locke’s Second Treatise, but it was Lockeianism with an American
gloss. A survey of Revolutionary literature both before and after
1776 reveals a number of modifications in and deviations from
the original treatise which the Americans made as they used the
great philosopher for their polemical purposes. The most familiar
was the substitution in the Declaration of Independence of the
pursuit of happiness for property. Another somewhat less familiar
and certainly less clearly defined change was the American re¬
fusal to make a sharp distinction between the state of nature and
civil society. These and other differences were apparent before
the final break with England. The establishment of republican gov¬
ernments induced still other differences, of which the most im¬
portant were an emphasis on equality, an intensification of indi¬
vidualism, and the identification of Locke with republicanism.
The result was a subtle but substantial simplification and radicali-
zation of the doctrine of the Second Treatise.
None of the separate changes was radical in the sense of being
CECELIA M. KENYON 307
completely new or unrooted in the original Treatise or in the sev¬
enteenth-century body of thought upon which Locke drew. Nor
was their sum more radical than the ideas set forth by the Levellers
of the Civil War or their English heirs. Furthermore, the ideas
were rooted in the colonial past and were therefore not unfamiliar.
Yet the total complex was radical in implication and operation,
especially when linked with the belief in, as well as the practice of,
republicanism.
The most important of the changes was the American tendency
to blur the differences which Locke had either stated or implied
between the state of nature and the state of civil society. The con¬
cept of a state of nature was familiar to American thinkers before
Locke wrote the Second Treatise, and, in American Puritan thought,
it more closely resembled the Hobbesian version than the Lockeian.
Americans emphasized the innate selfishness of man and the con¬
sequently hostile competition of a society in which men lived
without the external restraints of law and government. Like
Hobbes and Locke, they used the concept as a justification of gov¬
ernment. What they did not do was to accept the idea that govern¬
ment could or would provide a completely impartial judge. 9 Their
long experience in colonial self-government had taught them the
inevitability of factious disputes and the difficulty if not the im¬
possibility of securing impartial legislators and governors. Fur¬
thermore, the basis of their case against Parliamentary taxation
and against the British theory of virtual representation had been
the assumption that men in politics pursue their selfish interests
and, in doing so, influence governmental policy. Accordingly, long
before Madison’s famous Tenth Federalist, Americans had ques¬
tioned the likelihood, though not the ideal, of government as an
impartial judge. Perhaps because their governments were already
more republican than anything Locke knew, they were more
acutely aware of "the people” as a collectivity of different and
sometimes competitive groups and individuals than he was.
Similarly, because they expected men to behave selfishly in civil
society, whether in or out of the government, they were also more
rigorous than Locke was in attempting to insure that the rights
men were entitled to in the state of nature were actually enjoyed in
civil society. Locke had left the rights of the individual in an am-
9 James Otis, ‘The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved”
(1764), in Charles F. Mullett, ed.. Some Political Writings of James Otis
(Columbia, Mo., 1929), I, 54: “The necessity of a common, indifferent and
impartial judge, makes all men seek one; though few find him in the
sovereign 'power, of their respective states or any where else in subordination
to it.”
308 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
biguous if not precarious position. He stated that the consent of
the majority could be taken for the consent of the individual and
that, for generations other than the original contracting one, con¬
sent might be no more than tacit acceptance of the status quo.
Locke also said that the original contractors might select heredi¬
tary monarchy or aristocracy as the form of government. Further¬
more, the only kind of revolution Locke defined as a legitimate
one was a revolution by the majority of the people. Thus, although
he provided for protection of majority rights against monarchical
or aristocratic infringement, he did not provide, either in the
ordinary operation of government or through revolutionary means,
for the protection of individual or minority rights against a
majority or against a government supported by a majority. These
rights would be secure only if the majority acted in accordance
with the dictates of natural law. Locke seems to have assumed
that it would so act, though he did not assume that individuals
would always do so. The Americans were more consistent and
more pessimistic. They did not assume that the behavior of groups
of men, whether minorities or majorities, would be more virtuous
than that of individuals. In the decade of constitutional protest
before Lexington and Concord, the Americans found Locke very
congenial and useful, for in the Second Treatise the problem of se¬
curing liberty is treated almost entirely in terms of the people
against the government. Since the colonists were not represented
in Parliament, their position was more or less that of Locke’s “peo¬
ple,” while Parliament’s was that of Locke’s “government.” But
the Americans did not ignore the fact that Parliament also rep¬
resented the people of England and thus was, in another sense, a
Lockeian “majority.” James Wilson’s case against Parliamentary
authority over the colonies rested not only on the argument that
the members of Parliament were not bound to Americans by mu¬
tual or identical interests, but on the assumption that members of
Parliament were bound in this way to their English constituents
and could therefore be held accountable by the latter. 10 It followed
10 See the emphatic statement to this effect in Wilson's "On the Legislative
Authority of the British Parliament” (1774), in Bird Wilson, ed.. The Works
of the Honorable James Wilson, L.L.D. . . . (Philadelphia, 1804), III, 211:
"The interest of the representatives is the same with that of their constitu¬
ents. Every measure, that is prejudicial to the nation, must be prejudicial
to them and their posterity. They cannot betray their electors, without, at
the same time, injuring themselves. They must join in bearing the burthen
of every oppressive act; and participate in the happy effects of every wise
and good law. Influenced by these considerations, they will seriously and
with attention examine every measure proposed to them; they will behold it
in every light, and extend their views to its most distant consequences.”
CECELIA M. KENYON 309
that the interests of Americans and of Englishmen were different.
By implication, therefore, the people of England were responsible
for Parliamentary oppression, not just Parliament itself. Americans
constituted a minority in the Empire of which they regarded
themselves members, and their demand for legislative autonomy
under the Crown was, in one sense, a means to protect their
minority rights and interests.
Thus, in their collective relationship to Parliament, the col¬
onists had had some experience with governmental policies which
represented, from their point of view, a self-interested and domi¬
nant faction of the Empire. Far more important in determining
their political attitudes, however, was their long experience in
internal colonial politics. Long before the natural rights doctrine
of the Second Treatise was generally accepted, the existence of
factions had been recognized and deplored, and eventually ac¬
cepted. 11 The Americans had advanced far beyond the point where
they could view the problems of liberty and its opposite simply in
terms of the people against the government. Their political ideas
reflected not only the influence of Locke, but also the lessons of
their greater experience in self-government. Accordingly, while
Locke himself was ambiguous as to how and to what extent the
rights of the individual or of minorities would be protected in
civil society, his avowed disciples were not. They emphasized the
necessity of securing the rights derived from the state of nature
u The development of American colonial thought on this subject is reflected
in various of the Election Sermons given in New England in the latter
part of the 17th century and the first two-thirds of the 18th. Note the variety
as well as the similarity of views expressed in these three sermons: “Take
heed of any Sinister Aims in whatsoever Laws do pass: Laws made to
strengthen a particular separate Interest, never did Good, but Hurt to a
Body-Politick: that which may serve the present turn, may in a little time
prove more Mischievous, than ever it was Advantageous.” (Samuel Willard,
The Character of a Good Ruler . . . [Boston, 1694], 27.) “Where there are
Envyings and Strifes, Animosities and Divisions, there is Confusion and
every Evil Work. Where these Govern, if men can but Obtain their par¬
ticular Ends and Desires, Advance their Party, Confound their Opposers,
they are Content, what Prejudices soever the Publick Suffers: Then all the
good Offices that make Society Valuable are Intercepted, and Fierceness,
and Provocations, and Injuries Succeed.” (Timothy Cutler, The Firm Union
of a People Represented . . . [New London, 1717], 33.) “Every large com¬
munity is constituted of a number of little societies, in which there will be
different branches of business. These, whatever pains are taken to prevent
it, will have their different connections, and form separate interests; it is
vastly difficult for those who govern, to keep the balance so exactly poized
that neither part may be injured; but much more, to prevent jealousies and
suspicions that things are carried by favor and affection.” (Andrew Eliot,
A Sermon Preached before Bis Excellency Francis Bernard . . . [Boston,
1765], 14.)
310 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
against both a monarch and a legislative majority in a civil
society. The fear of majority oppression, which has been so per¬
sistent and pervasive a factor in American politics, was thus firmly
rooted in colonial experience and in the movement of protest which
resulted in revolution and independence. When combined with
another major modification in the original Locke, this position
led the Revolutionists to a radical individualism.
This modification was the substitution of the pursuit of happi¬
ness for property in the Lockeian trilogy of rights. The substitu¬
tion was not a mere linguistic one made in the Declaration of
Independence for rhetorical effect. The colonists had included
happiness as one of the natural and fundamental rights in pole¬
mical literature of the preceding decade. John Dickinson, for
example, had gone so far as to suggest that the constitutionality
of Parliamentary statutes be measured by their tendency to make
the people of America happy. 12 So indefinite a concept was ob¬
viously impossible as a legal test, but the idea of happiness as an
end of government was firmly rooted in colonial attitudes before
1776. It was, furthermore, a far more individualistic end than the
protection of property. 13 Property was a tangible, objective ele-
“See John Dickinson, The Political Writings of John Dickinson . . .
(Wilmington, Del., 1801), I, 332, 395.
“I do not mean to imply that the exclusion of property from the Declara¬
tion of Independence meant that Americans had ceased to regard it as a
natural right to be secured by government. They had not; many of them
probably continued to regard it as superior or prior to that of the pursuit
of happiness, while the majority saw no conflict between the two. The line
of reasoning to which I would call attention is exemplified in John Dickin¬
son's An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados (Phila¬
delphia, 1766), and in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the
Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Boston, 1768). From the former:
"kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness, as
you confess those invaded by the Stamp Act to be. We claim them from a
higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. ... It
would be an insult on the divine Majesty to say, that he has given or allowed
any man or body of men a right to make me miserable. If no man or body
of men has such a right, I have a right to be happy. If there can be no
happiness without freedom, I have a right to be free. If I cannot enjoy
freedom without security of property, I have a right to be thus secured”
pp. 4—5. From the Letters from a Farmer : "Let these truths be indelibly im¬
pressed on our minds—that we cannot be happy without being free—that
we cannot be free, without being secure in our property—that we cannot be
secure in our property, if, without our consent, others may, as by right,
take it away—that taxes imposed on us by Parliament, do thus take it
away. . . ." p. 137. Dickinson is here clearly placing happiness as a right
logically prior to property and even to liberty, which stand in relation to it
as means to end. James Wilson also emphasized happiness rather than
property, stating that, "the happiness of the society is the first law of every
government." Wilson, Works, HI, 206.
By placing the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration, and omitting
CECELIA M. KENYON 311
ment, while happiness was a subjective goal dependent on indi¬
vidual interpretation. Also, the assertion of a right to happiness
had strong equalitarian implications. The concept of property
as a right to be protected and fostered by government may be and
has been interpreted to mean the protection of property already
vested in individuals. It may therefore mean the preservation of
the status quo, and the status quo may be an aristocratic one.
This seems to have been Locke's intention, for there is nothing in
the Second Treatise to suggest that he had an economic or social
revolution in mind. The idea of the pursuit of happiness neces¬
sarily had both dynamic and equalitarian implications, and these
have played a substantial role in American politics. The situation
at the time of the Revolution was not such as to lead to an ex¬
plosive implementation of these implications, but the implications
were there, and to some extent recognized and acted upon. Since
happiness is a subjective state, no individual can decide for an¬
other what will promote his happiness. If happiness is really an
end of government, and if all men have by nature an equal right
to the pursuit of it, then it follows logically that every man should
have a voice in the determination of public policy. Thus the two
American modifications—the emphasis on happiness rather than
property, and the greater concern for the actual implementation of
rights in civil society—led to a democratization of Locke as well
as to an unequivocal individualism.
The relationship between the ideal of individual happiness and
the recognition of factions in society was an important one. As
I have indicated before, the Americans had become thoroughly
familiar with the existence and operation of factious divisions in
society, and they had come to accept with considerable equanim¬
ity the fact that self-interest was a primary political motive. They
therefore could not, as Locke for the most part did, think and
write of “the people” as a corporate whole more or less distinct
from the government. Such a dichotomy was not absent from
their thought, but because they had already had experience with
a relatively high degree of representative government, they were
property, Jefferson gave official sanction to these views. If the Declaration
had lapsed into obscurity, this departure from Locke’s trilogy might not
have been particularly important, except for the historical record. But the
Declaration did not become an historian’s document merely. It became an
ideological force, and this helped to make Jefferson’s substitution operative
in actual political life. Of course one may also raise the question whether
the Declaration would have had the influence that it has had, if the substitu-
tion had not been made. Needless to say, the omission of property from the
Declaration did not keep it from becoming a dominant, if not the dominant,
right during certain periods of United States history.
312 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
aware of government as a tool of the stronger faction among the
people. This realistic or pessimistic attitude toward human nature
has come to be associated with conservatism, but it had a logical
connection with the radical implications of the Declaration of
Independence. It embodied the American view that the same
defects of human nature which Locke and Hobbes had used to
explain the transition from the state of nature to civil society
would still jeopardize the ends for which government was insti¬
tuted. The connection was succinctly stated in Jefferson’s First
Inaugural Address: "Some times it is said that Man cannot be
trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted
with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the
form of kings to govern him?” 14 In other words, the imperfection
of man was itself an argument for republican government. By
logical extension, it was also an argument for a democratic
republic. For if all men were equally entitled to the rights of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and if self-interest was a
universal characteristic of human nature, then all men must be
given the opportunity of defending their rights against encroach¬
ment by others. Thus, although the colonists had not set out with
the intention of establishing republicanism, once they had done
so, as a corollary of independence, the pessimistic strain in their
thought provided ideological reinforcement for practical accom¬
plishment. Similarly, the estabhshment of republican govern-
ments served to accentuate the equalitarian and individualistic
content of their official philosophy.
This philosophy was one of radical individualism, and it was
accepted, I think, by the majority of Americans at the time, in¬
cluding many of those who are frequently regarded as conserva¬
tives. Without abandoning completely the concept of a common
good or public interest or justice, they tended to regard the
pursuit of self-interest as legitimate and sought primarily to avoid
an overwhelming concentration of power behind a single interest,
whether it be upper or lower class, urban, rural, northern, south-
em, or other. It was the refusal of Thomas Paine and Alexander
Hamilton to accept this individualism which made both of them
alien to the prevailing political attitude. Paine was a radical
democrat, but he could not stomach the rough and tumble politics
of his colleagues in Pennsylvania, who pursued what he regarded
as selfish interests with little restraint. Similarly, Hamilton could
not recognize opposition to his policies as legitimate because he
u Ford, ed.. Works of Jefferson, IX, 196.
CECELIA M. KENYON 313
interpreted the national interest in terms of corporate greatness,
while his opponents interpreted it in terms of individual satisfac¬
tion. Paine and Hamilton, therefore, were both conservative in
their attitude toward the proper ends of government and the
proper political behavior of individual citizens. The individualism
which they rejected was not new in theory. It was clearly explicit
in The Leviathan , present though somewhat obscured in the Sec¬
ond Treatise, and had been an increasing element in both colonial
thought and practice. With the coming of the Revolution it be¬
came manifestly operative, and has continued to exert a decisive
influence in American politics.
This individualism, rooted in colonial experience but trans¬
formed by the break with Britain and the establishment of repub¬
lican governments, had ramifications which influenced the nature
of our political tradition and served further to set it apart from
that of the mother country. These ramifications, though some of
them did not become apparent until much later, help to illu¬
minate the radical effects of the Revolution.
As I have suggested in the preceding pages, the individualism
of the early republic was associated with equalitarianism in civil
society as well as in the state of nature. Of this, the Revolutionists
were themselves aware. They were less aware of the relativistic
implications of the theory summarized in the Declaration, and
of the extent to which that theory gave philosophical justification
to the egoism which they so frequently and habitually deplored,
but which they accepted as an ordinary ingredient of politics.
The relativism of the Declaration can be summarized briefly. Two
of the central rights, to which all men are entitled, are not amen¬
able to objective definition or delimitation. The liberty of the
trilogy was to some extent defined in the specific terms of tra¬
ditional procedural liberties associated with the British constitu¬
tion or common law, and in the newer substantive terms of free¬
dom of speech, press, and religion. There were also attempts, by
Jefferson and Paine, for example, to classify rights into primary
and secondary categories, the latter being subject to social or
political regulation. Except for the allegedly absolute rights of
the first order, a man’s liberty was commonly said to extend so
far as it did not interfere with or jeopardize the similar liberties
of other men. This sounds like a good enough common-sense
definition. However, the Revolutionary American conception of
society as composed of selfish individuals and groups whose inter¬
ests would frequently be in conflict, suggests the impossibility
of using that common-sense definition in practice with any degree
314 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of precision. If, that is to say, men’s interests habitually and
normally come into conflict, then this formula is not altogether
relevant or applicable. Somewhat the same thing is true of the
third right in the trilogy, the pursuit of happiness. It is an even
more subjective right than liberty. And unless one assumes a
very harmonious society, the happiness of different individuals
are likely to come in conflict with each other. If all individuals
possess these rights equally, and if they are an integral end of
government, then there is no logical criterion by which such
conflicts can be adjudicated. There is no way to define justice
objectively, and there is great difficulty in defining the substantive
common good objectively, except perhaps in some obvious crisis
of national preservation. What is left is political relativism,
combined with a philosophy of natural rights which tended to
provide a justification of political and ethical egoism.
I do not think the men of the Revolution were fully aware of
the trend of their thought. They continued to think in terms of
justice and the general welfare and to deplore man’s tendency
toward self-interest and bias. Their hostility to parties is in itself
an indication of their belief in a common good to which all men
owed their allegiance. Nevertheless, the relativism implicit in
natural rights doctrine had undermined the operative force of
the common good by making it difficult if not impossible to define.
This difficulty of defining justice or the common interest would,
paradoxically and ironically, encourage the propensity to use ideo¬
logical stereotypes in political debate.
Had the Americans been imbued with a strong sense of na¬
tionalism, or had their security not been so easily achieved by
the happy windfall of Louisiana and the physical barrier of the
Atlantic Ocean, this relativism might have been balanced by a
concern for national defense or perhaps national glory. As it was,
the same individualism which produced the relativism contributed
to the really profound inclination toward isolation and withdrawal
from international affairs. It is perhaps ironical that the Declar¬
ation of Independence, written partly for the purpose of securing
foreign aid, should have had so strong an influence in the direc¬
tion of concentration on domestic affairs. Yet I think it did. If
the primary function of government is believed to be the protec-
tion of individual rights, and if by the grace of history and
geography this can be done in the absence of serious and con¬
tinuous threats from abroad, then it is natural that the people
involved should be primarily occupied with immediate and do¬
mestic concerns. If, furthermore, they have another ocean to aim
CECELIA M. KENYON 315
at, with nothing much in between but a few savages, and if they
regard themselves as the world’s torchbearers for a great ideal,
whatever ambitions they may have for national and imperial
greatness may be satisfied with a minimum awareness of or
involvement in the affairs of other nations. There was very little
to keep Americans constantly aware of one of the traditional
functions of statehood—defense against external danger. This
fact, plus the nature of our federal system, inhibited the emer¬
gence of a sense of national interest transcendent of individual,
group, and sectional interests which would supply content for the
concept of the common good. There was thus no strong compen¬
satory factor, such as the mystique of the British Empire, to
offset the relativism and individualism implicit in Revolutionary
doctrine.
These factors, combined with the Revolutionary acceptance of
egoism, gradually brought about a major divergence in the
American attitude toward politics from the heritage which the
colonists had shared with the home country. At the time of the
Revolution, in America as in Britain, politics was an occupation
regarded with respect and engaged in by men of distinguished
qualities. It was, to use modem sociological terminology, a pres¬
tige occupation. To be sure, this condition was due in part to the
property qualifications for officeholding, in some colonies and
states considerably stiffer than those for voting. But far more
important, both ambition and a sense of responsibility drew men
of wealth and learning into colonial, state, and federal office. It
was Jefferson’s intention and hope that his scheme of education
would, among other things, provide a reservoir of political leaders
—a kind of aristocracy of talent. This concept of aristocratic
leadership was undermined in a number of ways. Historically as
well as philosophically, it had been linked with belief in an ob¬
jective good, and it was this link which the idea of happiness as
an end of government tended to negate. For if individual happi¬
ness—or self-interest—is an end of government, then one man’s
opinion is as good as another. Thus, though the concept of the
public good as a composite of individual and group interests does
not require the rejection of wisdom and virtue as a qualification
for the exercise of political authority, it does promote a powerful
alternative—identity of opinion and interest, or the willingness to
give the voter what he wants. To be sure, this was not a peculiarly
American phenomenon, as Burke’s experience with the electors of
Bristol indicates. Furthermore, there was a touch of the Burkeian
theory of representation in that of the authors of the Constitution,
316 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
especially in their attitude toward the Senate. Nevertheless, the
realism concerning political motivation and behavior which char¬
acterized the American attitude, as it was summarized in the
Tenth Federalist, expressed something very close to a theory of
pressure group politics. And it is this kind of politics which, by
and large, has dominated the American tradition. However, Ameri¬
cans have never been completely comfortable with it, and their
uneasiness has produced a reliable scapegoat. At the time of the
Revolution, dissatisfaction found expression and release in the
almost universal dislike and distrust of parties, a tribute to the
lost ideal of a transcendent public good. Gradually, this antipathy
was extended to the men who manned and ran the parties, the
politicians. There has thus been a peculiar schizophrenia in the
American political mind. On the one hand, we have engaged in
pressure and partisan politics continuously and with vigor; on
the other, we despise the men who act as brokers to carry out
our demands, whether honestly or corruptly. Even now, a sure
way of winning popular approval is to create the image that one
is not a politician. Something of the same attitude is involved
in the American reaction to the word and the fact of bipartisan¬
ship; it gives a comfortable sense of satisfied virtue. This distrust
and contempt for politicians is no doubt partially attributable to
the personal corruption of individuals, but it has more profound
causes, and one of these is the somewhat obscurely felt dissatis¬
faction with the relativism and its consequent pressure group
politics which have as their basis the radical individualism of the
Declaration of Independence.
VI
Equally radical was the Revolution's culmination, the creation
and adoption of the Constitution of 1787. There had been feder¬
ations of states before, both in ancient and modem times, and
the idea of a central government had become familiar in America
with the Albany Plan, the first two Continental Congresses, and
the Articles of Confederation. What was new was the direct
control over the central government exercised by the electorate,
the relative independence of that government with respect to the
governments of the constituent states, and its direct authority
over the individual citizens of those states. This was a govern¬
ment so new that, as its critics gibed, it lacked a name. It was,
in the strict meaning of the word, radical.
CECELIA M. KENYON 317
Its opponents perceived this fact from the very beginning, and
both the spirit and substance of their polemics provide evidence
of a typically conservative stance. They argued that the Phila¬
delphia Convention had gone too far, that they had exceeded
their instructions, that there was no necessity for an entirely new
frame of government, and that a little patching up of the Articles
of Confederation would have been sufficient. They pointed out
that what was proposed had never been done before and bewailed
the loss of resistance to innovation which the Revolution itself
had induced in the people. They paraded a succession of imagi¬
nary horribles, and they said that the authors of the Constitution
had based their scheme of government on too optimistic a view
of human nature. Furthermore, they saw quite clearly that the
Constitution, if adopted, would bring about a new kind of politics
in which large-scale organization would be a major factor, and
they identified the old, familiar, personal politics with liberty and
responsible government. Most important and most significant,
they denied that the principle and practice of republicanism could
be made operative over the area and population then embraced
by the thirteen separate states. Their position, both with respect
to the status quo of 1776-87 and with that of the pre-Revolution-
ary experience of self-government, was the conservative one in
the great debate over ratification. 15
It was the Founding Fathers who were the true radicals. In
the very first number of The Federalist, Hamilton struck a radical
stance when he stated that the question for decision was whether
mankind could determine its government by deliberate choice or
must continue to be subject to the forces of accident and chance. 16
Indeed, the whole idea of drafting a constitution for an entire
nation and then submitting it to conventions chosen by the people
for ratification or rejection was radical in the extreme, though
the example of Massachusetts had provided a precedent for a
similar procedure on a much smaller scale. Scholars may argue
until doomsday as to whether the Constitution was democratic
or not, but they are less likely to argue as to whether it was a
new departure in political institutions. It must rank with the
establishment of republican government and the philosophy of
the Declaration of Independence as one of the great and radical
achievements of the Revolution.
15 This interpretation is presented at some length in my article, “Men of
Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Govern¬
ment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XII (1955), 3—43.
“Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist, Wright, ed., 89.
318 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
VII
The establishment of a. new nation, the initiation of the first
great modem experiment in republican government, the combi¬
nation of this experiment with an entirely new kind of federalism,
the crystallization in operative form of a political philosophy of
individualism and equality—these were the results of the Ameri¬
can Revolution. Together with the Revolutionary experience itself,
they gave decisive shape to the American political tradition and,
in particular, operated to differentiate it from that of the mother
country and from those of the older British Commonwealths
which won their independence in a later period and without
revolution. The relatively short period of intensive opposition and
resistance to imperial impositions, the realistic recognition of
egoism as a general cause of these, the emphasis in the Declara¬
tion on the rights of the individual combined to fix in the Ameri¬
can Tninrl an ineradicable fear and distrust of government and
government officials, even when popularly elected. This general
fear was more profound and more enduring than the specific
fear of the executive which stemmed from colonial experience
with nonelective governors, and helped to sustain the system of
separation of powers, which was also rooted in colonial institu¬
tions. Later, the individualist relativism implicit in the Declaration,
added to this recognition of egoism, accentuated the distrust of
politicians, and reduced the prestige of government as a career.
To fear and distrust of government, there was thus added con¬
tempt. The American attitude toward government as a necessary
evil (and probably more evil than necessary) goes back to the
Revolution. It has, perhaps paradoxically, continued to find ex¬
pression in the strong localist conservatism which helped precipi¬
tate the Revolution and later provided much of the opposition to
the Constitution. Our Revolutionary experience also both em¬
bodied and encouraged that peculiar combination of pragmatism
and appeal to ideological principles which has characterized
American political thinking. The men of 1776 did not set out to
establish republicanism, but once they had done so as a means
of securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
republicanism itself became a principle of political right. So it
has been with later concepts. We have not asked only whether
policies would or would not contribute to the realization of these
rights; we have asked whether the policies were democratic or
antidemocratic, socialist or laissez-faire. Our political tradition
CECELIA M. KENYON 319
has involved the interaction of pragmatic and ideological attitudes
and thus has reflected the spirit of 1776.
That spirit was not a particularly radical one, certainly not
when compared with that of the French Revolution, the Soviet
Revolution of 1917, or the nationalist revolutions of the present
time. It had a profoundly conservative aspect, and the radicalism
it involved was of a very sober variety. Apart from the recent
revival of conservatism and the consequent desire to establish
its roots in the political foundation of the nation, there are excel¬
lent reasons for regarding the American Revolution as conserva¬
tive—at least in some respects.
It was a limited revolution, and it was primarily a political
movement. There were some social and economic repercussions,
but there was no concerted, deliberate attempt at wholesale
reconstruction of society or of the habits and everyday lives of
the people. There was no American Robespierre or Lenin; Thomas
Paine, who looked like a radical in the American context, was
imprisoned in France because of the moderate position he took
there. The American leaders, even while initiating radical changes,
acted with sobriety and, with some exceptions, exhibited a political
sophistication based on experience in politics other than as revo¬
lutionists.
Most important of all, the Revolution began as a movement of
conservative protest, and none of its results represented a total
break with the colonial past. Independence had been preceded
by a long enjoyment of considerable autonomy; long before Paul
Revere ordered lanterns hung in the Old North Church, John
Winthrop had mounted a cannon on Beacon Hill to repel any
British attempt to seize the Charter of the Colony. Before Thomas
Paine ridiculed the British Monarchy in Common Sense, the
colonists had put a bridle on their governors. The ideas expressed
in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence were
not quite so firmly rooted in colonial experience, and the fact of
their formal acceptance gave them an operative force they had
previously lacked. But if we are to believe Thomas Jefferson, even
they had become embedded in the American mind. The one thing
which was most truly radical was the new federalism of the
Constitution of 1787. Even it had been preceded by the lesser
authority of the Empire and the experience of intercolonial co¬
operation preceding the war and under the Articles of Confeder¬
ation. And it was combined with a structure of government, many
of whose elements were familiar, because they, too, were rooted
in colonial institutions.
320 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
So it seems to me that we must conclude that the American
Revolution was partly radical and partly conservative. If I may
borrow a figure from the great Greek so despised by the author
of the Declaration of Independence, the character of the Revolu¬
tion was the character of the men who made it writ large. 17
Their attitude toward the past was selective. Part of it they wished
to preserve, part of it they wished to abandon. They were quite
self-conscious about the newness of their enterprise and referred
to it frequently as an experiment, but they never had the slightest
inclination to repudiate the whole of their British heritage or of
their colonial past. They had some fine old bricks to start with,
and they knew it. Nevertheless, what they designed and partly
built from these bricks was not Georgian. It was American, and
they knew that too.
17 In a letter to John Adams in 1814, Jefferson criticized The Republic
severely and speculated as to the reasons for Plato’s reputation. His general
estimate of the great philosopher is suggested by these references scattered
throughout a lengthy passage: “the whimsies, the puerilities, and unin¬
telligible jargon of this work,” “nonsense,” “foggy mind;” he also concluded
that Plato’s dialogues “are libels on Socrates.” Jefferson to John Adams,
July 5, 1814, in Ford, ed.. Works of Jefferson, XI, 396-398.
THE REVOLUTION
IN PRACTICE
Many of the more important tangible results of the
application of the Revolutionary ideals described in the
last two articles came well after the Revolutionary era,
in the closing years of the eighteenth and in the early
decades of the nineteenth cenutry. Two more immediate
concrete results of the Revolution that were genuinely
radical are discussed in the next two selections. The first
describes the process by which the Revolution led to a
broadening of the base of popular political participation
by drawing many men of modest wealth into politics and
assesses the long-range significance of that development.
The second article describes the constitution-making
process in the states, beginning in 1776. It shows how the
political community in Massachusetts discovered and
worked out a procedure by which the traditional notion
of the people as constituent power could be put into
practical effect and analyzes the importance of that novel
institutional achievement in Western political develop-
ment. By calling attention to the high seriousness
with which Americans approached the task of constitu¬
tion-making, the second selection also testifies to the
continuing importance of constitutionalism to the Revo¬
lution after the Declaration of Independence.
JACKSON TURNER main (b. 1917) is a member of the
Department of History at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook; r. r. palmer (b. 1909) is an ad¬
ministrative officer at Princeton University.
321
322 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Government by the People:
The American Revolution and the
Democratization of the Legislatures
JACKSON TURNER MAIN
An article with “democracy” in its title, these days, must ac¬
count for itself. This essay holds that few colonials in British
North America believed in a government by the people, and that
they were content to be ruled by local elites; but that during the
Revolution two interacting developments occurred simultaneously:
ordinary citizens increasingly took part in politics, and American
political theorists began to defend popular government. The ideo¬
logical shift can be traced most easily in the newspapers, while
evidence for the change in the structure of power will be found
in the make-up of the lower houses during the revolutionary
years.
Truly democratic ideas, defending a concentration of power in
the hands of the people, are difficult to find prior to about 1774.
Most articulate colonials accepted the Whig theory in which a
modicum of democracy was balanced by equal parts of aristoc¬
racy and monarchy. An unchecked democracy was uniformly
condemned. 1 For example, a contributor to the Newport Mercury
in 1764 felt that when a state was in its infancy, “when its
members are few and virtuous, and united together by some
peculiar ideas of freedom or religion; the whole power may be
lodged with the people, and the government be purely democrati-
cal”; but when the state had matured, power must be removed
from popular control because history demonstrated that the
people “have been incapable, collectively, of acting with any degree
of moderation or wisdom.” 2 Therefore while colonial theorists
Reprinted with permission from The William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd
ser., XXm (July, 1966), 391-407.
1 See Richard Buel, Jr., “Democracy and the American Revolution: A
Frame of Reference,” William and Mary Quarterly , XXI (1964), 165-190.
2 << Z. Y.,” April 23, 1764. Other characteristic newspaper articles praising
a balanced government and disparaging a democratic one are, “A Son of
liberty,” Providence Gazette , and Country Journal , October 26, 1771; Penn¬
sylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 29,
September 26, 1768, August 14, 1769; New-York Gazette: and the Weekly
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 323
recognized the need for some democratic element in the govern¬
ment, they did not intend that the ordinary people—the demos —
should participate. The poorer men were not allowed to vote at
all, and that part of the populace which did vote was expected
to elect the better sort of people to represent them. “Fabricus”
defended the “democratic principle,” warned that 'liberty, when
once lost, is scarce ever recovered,” and declared that laws were
“made for the people, and not people for the laws.” But he did
not propose that ordinary citizens should govern. Rather, “it is
right that men of birth and fortune, in every government that is
free, should be invested with power, and enjoy higher honours
than the people.” 3 According to William Smith of New York, offices
should be held by “the better Class of People” in order that they
might introduce that “Spirit of Subordination essential to good
Government.” 4 A Marylander urged that members of the Assembly
should be “able in estate, able in knowledge and learning,”
and mourned that so many “little upstart insignificant Pretenders”
tried to obtain an office. “The Creature that is able to keep a little
Shop, rate the Price of an Ell of Osnabrigs, or, at most, to judge
of the Quality of a Leaf of Tobacco” was not a fit statesman,
regardless of his own opinion. 5 So also in South Carolina, where
William Henry Drayton warned the artisans that mechanical
ability did not entitle them to hold office. 6 This conviction that
most men were incompetent to rule, and that the elite should
govern for them, proved a vital element in Whig thought and
was its most antidemocratic quality. The assumption was almost
never openly challenged during the colonial period.
Whether the majority whose capacity was thus maligned ac¬
cepted the insulting assumption is another question. They were
not asked, and as they were unable to speak or write on the
subject, their opinions are uncertain. But the voters themselves
seem to have adhered, in practice at least, to the traditional view,
for when the people were asked to choose their representatives
they seldom elected common farmers and artisans. Instead they
put their trust in men of the upper class. In the colonies as a
whole, about 30 per cent of the adult white men owned property
Mercury , April 23, May 14, 1770; Purdie and Dixon's Virginia Gazette (Wil¬
liamsburg), October 27, 1768; Connecticut Journal (New Haven), March 17,
1769; Newport Mercury, November 21, 1763.
8 Rind’s Va. Gazette (Williamsburg), June 9, 1768.
^December 30, 1768, in Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony
of New-York . . . 1743 . . . 1775 (Albany, 1861).
5 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), December 3, 1767.
*South Carolina Gazette (Charleston), September 21, 1769.
324 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
worth £500 or more. About two thirds of these colonials of means
had property worth £500 to £2,000; their economic status is here
called moderate. The other third were worth over £2,000. Those
worth £2,000 to £5,000 are called well-to-do, and those whose
property was valued at more than £5,000 are called wealthy. 7
The overwhelming majority of the representatives belonged to
that ten per cent who were well-to-do or wealthy. Government
may have been for the people, but it was not administered by
them. For evidence we turn to the legislatures of New Hampshire,
New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.
In 1765 New Hampshire elected thirty-four men to its House of
Representatives. 8 Practically all of them lived within a few miles
of the coast; the frontier settlements could not yet send deputies,
and the Merrimack Valley towns in the south-central part of the
colony, though populous, were allotted only seven. New Hamp¬
shire was not a rich colony. Most of its inhabitants were small
farmers with property enough for an adequate living but no more.
There were a few large agricultural estates, and the Portsmouth
area had developed a prosperous commerce which supported some
wealthy merchants and professional men; but judging from
probate records not more than one man in forty was well-to-do,
and true wealth was very rare. Merchants, professional men, and
the like comprised about one tenth of the total population, though
in Portsmouth, obviously, the proportion was much larger. Prob¬
ably at least two thirds of the inhabitants were farmers or farm
laborers and one in ten was an artisan. But New Hampshire
voters did not call on farmers or men of average property to
represent them. Only about one third of the representatives in the
1765 House were yeomen. Merchants and lawyers were just as
numerous, and the rest followed a variety of occupations: there
were four doctors and several millers and manufacturers. One
third of the delegates were wealthy men and more than two
thirds were at least well-to-do. The relatively small upper class
of the colony, concentrated in the southeast, furnished ten of
the members. They did not, of course, constitute a majority, and
the family background of most of the representatives, like that
7 A discussion of the distribution of property and income is contained in
Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America
(Princeton, 1965).
8 Biographical information is reasonably complete for 30 of the 34.
Genealogies and town histories were the principal sources. The New Hamp¬
shire Provincial and State Papers contain much useful information, especially
probate records, and the New England Historical and Genealogical Register
is valuable.
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 325
of most colonials, was undistinguished. Probably nearly one half
had acquired more property and prestige than their parents. In
another age New Hampshire’s lower house would have been con¬
sidered democratic—compared with England’s House of Com¬
mons it certainly was—but this was a new society, and the voters
preferred the prosperous urban upper class and the more sub¬
stantial farmers.
New York was a much richer colony than New Hampshire. Al¬
though most of its population were small farmers and tenants,
there were many large landed estates and New York City was
incomparably wealthier than Portsmouth. In general the west
bank of the Hudson and the northern frontier were usually con¬
trolled by the yeomanry, as was Suffolk County on Long Island,
but the east bank from Albany to the City was dominated by
great “manor lords” and merchants. The great landowners and
the merchants held almost all of the twenty-eight seats in the
Assembly. 9 In 1769 the voters elected only seven farmers. Five
others including Frederick Philipse and Pierre Van Cortland, the
wealthy manor lords from Westchester, were owners of large
tenanted estates. But a majority of New York’s legislators were
townspeople. Merchants were almost as numerous as farmers,
and together with lawyers they furnished one half of the ifiem-
bership. The legislators were no more representative in their
property than in their occupation. At most, five men, and prob¬
ably fewer, belonged to the middle class of moderate means. At
least 43 per cent were wealthy and an equal number were well-
to-do. The members’ social background was also exceptional. Ten
came from the colony’s foremost families who had, for the times,
a distinguished ancestry, and two thirds or more were bom of
well-to-do parents. Taken as a whole the legislators, far from
reflecting New York’s social structure, had either always belonged
to or had successfully entered the colony’s economic and social
upper class.
New Jersey’s Assembly was even smaller than that of New
York. The body chosen in 1761, and which sat until 1769, con¬
tained but twenty men. 10 Half of these represented the East
^Especially important for New York biographies are the volumes of wills
included among the Collections of the New York Historical Society, and the
New York Biographical Record.
10 In 1769 four new members were added, and six more were chosen in
1772. The New Jersey Archives include several volumes of wills. Tax records,
the earliest of which date from 1773, supply data on real estate but not on
nonfarm property. They have been microfilmed from originals in the New
Jersey State library, Trenton.
326 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Jersey counties (near New York City) which were in general
occupied by small farmers, but only three of the ten members
came from that class. The others were merchants, lawyers, and
large proprietors. Although several of these had started as yeomen
they had all acquired large properties. West Jersey, which had
a greater number of sizable landed estates, especially in the
Delaware Valley region, sent the same sort of men as did East
Jersey: three farmers, an equal number of large landowners, and
an even larger number of prosperous townsmen, some of whom
also owned valuable real estate. Merchants and lawyers made
up one half of the membership. As usual, a considerable pro¬
portion—perhaps forty per cent—were self-made men, but the
colony's prominent old f amili es furnished at least 30 per cent of
the representatives. Four out of five members were either well-
to-do or wealthy.
In contrast to the legislatures of New Hampshire, New York,
and New Jersey, Maryland's House of Delegates was a large body
and one dominated by the agricultural interest. Like its northern
equivalents, however, its members belonged to the upper class
of the colony—in Maryland, the planter aristocracy. The 1765
House supposedly contained over sixty members, but only fifty-
four appear in the records. 11 About one half of these came from
the Eastern Shore, an almost entirely rural area. Except for Col.
Thomas Cresap who lived on Maryland's small frontier, the re¬
mainder came from the Potomac River and western Chesapeake
Bay counties, where agriculture was the principal occupation but
where a number of towns also existed. About one sixth of the
Delegates belonged to the yeoman farmer class. Most of these
lived on the Eastern Shore. Incidentally they did not vote with the
antiproprietary, or "popular,” party, but rather followed some
of the great planters in the conservative "court” party. As in the
northern colonies, a number of the Delegates were nouveaux
riches, but in Maryland's stable and primarily "Tidewater” society,
fewer than one fifth had surpassed their parents in wealth. The
overwhelming majority came from the lesser or the great planter
class, and probably one third belonged to the colony's elite fami¬
lies. Four fifths were well-to-do or wealthy. Lawyers and merchants
(among whom were several of the self-made men) furnished
about one sixth of the principally rural membership.
Virginia's Burgesses resembled Maryland's Delegates, but they
^The Maryland Historical Magazine contains a great deal of biographical
data. Essential are the unpublished tax lists in the Maryland State Archives,
Annapolis, and the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 327
were even richer and of even more distinguished ancestry. The
Old Dominion’s much larger west helped to make the House of
Burgesses twice as large a body, with 122 members in 1773. 12
Small property holders, though they formed a great majority of
the voters, held only one out of six seats. Half of the Burgesses
were wealthy and four fifths were at least well-to-do. Merchants
and lawyers contributed one fifth of the members, much more
than their proper share, but most of them were also large land¬
holders and the legislature was firmly in control of the great
planters. Indeed the median property owned was 1,800 acres
and 40 slaves. Virginia’s social structure was quite fluid, espe¬
cially in the newly-settled areas, but between five sixths and seven
eighths of the delegates had inherited their property. A roll call
of the Burgesses would recite the names of most of the colony’s
elite families, who held nearly one half of the seats.
The planters of South Carolina, unlike the Virginians, were
unwilling to grant representation to the upcountry, and its House
of Commons was an exclusively eastern body. 13 The colony was
newer and its society may have been more fluid, for in 1765
between 20 and 40 per cent of the representatives were self-made
men. The legislature also differed from its southern equivalents
in Maryland and Virginia in that nearly half of its members were
merchants, lawyers, or doctors. But these figures are deceptive,
for in reality most of these men were also great landowners, as
were almost all of the representatives; and prominent old families
contributed one half of the members of the House. All were at
least well-to-do and over two thirds were wealthy. The rich plant¬
ers of South Carolina’s coastal parishes held a monopoly of power
in the Assembly.
These six legislatures, from New Hampshire to South Carolina,
shared the same qualities. Although farmers and artisans com¬
prised probably between two thirds and three fourths of the
voters in the six colonies, they seldom selected men from their
own ranks to represent them. Not more than one out of five
representatives were of that class. Fully one third were merchants
^he 1773 legislature was chosen for study because the tax records of
1782, which are the earliest available, would be most nearly valid in de¬
termining the property of the members. The Virginia State Library, Rich¬
mond, contains the tax records as well as a remarkable collection of local
records on microfilm. E. G. Swem, comp., Virginia Historical Index (Roa¬
noke, 1934-1936), I-H, is useful.
“The South Carolina Historical Magazine is essential, as is E m ily Bellinger
Reynolds and Joan Reynolds Faunt, eds., Biographical Directory of the
Senate of South Carolina 1776-1964 (Columbia, 1964). There are some quit
rent and probate records in the State Archives building at Columbia.
328 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and lawyers or other professionals, and most of the rest were
large landowners. Although only about 10 per cent of the colo¬
nials were well-to-do or wealthy, this economic elite furnished at
least 85 per cent of the assemblymen. The mobile character of
colonial society meant that perhaps 30 per cent had achieved
their high status by their own efforts; but an even larger per¬
centage were from prominent, long-established families.
Collectively these "representatives of the people” comprised not
a cross section of the electorate but a segment of the upper class.
Although the colonials cherished the democratic branch of their
governments, and although a majority may have hoped to make
the lower house all powerful, they did not yet conceive that the
demos should actually govern. The idea of a government by as
well as for the people was a product of the Revolution. It should
be noted here that Rhode Island and Connecticut are exceptions
to this general pattern, though the upper house of Connecticut
was composed entirely of well-to-do men. As for Massachusetts,
the number of representatives with moderate properties exceeded
that in the royal and proprietary colonies; but the Massachusetts
legislature was still controlled by the well-to-do. Of the 117 men
in the House in 1765, at least fifty-six were not farmers and
thirteen were large landowners; of the remaining forty-eight,
thirty-seven were ordinary farmers and the occupations of eleven
are unknown. Among those representatives whose economic status
can be discovered (about nine tenths), well over one half were
well-to-do or wealthy and two fifths of these had inherited their
property.
Widespread popular participation in politics began during
1774 with the various provincial congresses and other extralegal
organizations. Although the majority of these bodies seem to have
been made up of men of standing, both artisans and farmers
appeared in greater numbers than they had in the colonial legis¬
latures. There were several reasons for this. Whereas heretofore
the more recently settled areas of most colonies had been under¬
represented—at times seriously so—the legal prohibitions on
their sending representatives to the colonial assemblies did not
apply to the extralegal congresses, and they chose delegates when
they wished. Moreover the congresses were much larger than the
colonial assemblies, and consequently the over-all number of men
who could be elected was greatly increased. For instance, South
Carolina’s House of Commons contained forty-eight men in 1772,
but almost twice that number attended the first Provincial Con¬
gress in December 1774 and four times as many were present in
January 1775. By 1775 the western districts were sending about
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 329
one third of the members. Similarly, nothing now prevented New
Hampshire’s country villages from choosing representatives, and
they seized the opportunity. By the time the fourth Provincial
Congress met in New Hampshire, four times as many men at¬
tended as had been admitted to the 1773 legislature, and nearly
one half of them came from the inland counties.
Perhaps an even more important reason for the greater par¬
ticipation in politics by men of moderate means than simply the
enlarged and broadened membership of the Provincial Congresses
was that the interior areas often contained no real upper class.
They had no choice but to send men of moderate property.
Furthermore, many men of the upper classes who had previously
held political power were not sympathetic with the resistance
movement and either withdrew from politics or did not participate
in the extralegal Congresses. At the same time events thrust new
men forward, as for example in Charleston where the artisans
became increasingly active. As the Revolution ran its course,
many new men came to fill the much larger number of civil
offices, and new men won fame in battle. These developments
were quickly reflected in the composition of the legislatures, and
by the time the war ended the legislatures were far different
bodies from what they had been in colonial days. At the same
time democratic ideas spread rapidly, justifying and encouraging
the new order. 14
With the overthrow of royal government, the previously un¬
represented New Hampshire villages hastened to choose repre¬
sentatives to the state legislature. The number of men present
in the lower house varied considerably, for small communities
were too poor to send a man every year, while others combined
to finance the sending of a single delegate; but during the 1780’s
between two and three times as many attended as before the war.
The House chosen in 1786 had eighty-eight members. The balance
of power had shifted into the Merrimack Valley, for fewer than
half of the delegates came from the two counties near the coast,
and even these included frontier settlements. 15
The socio-economic composition of the New Hampshire legis-
14 For the development of democratic ideas after 1774, see Merrill Jensen,
‘"Democracy and file American Revolution,” Huntington Library Quarterly ,
XX (1957), 321-341. The entrance of many new men into the upper house,
and their transformation into more nearly democratic institutions, is em¬
phasized in Main, “Social Origins of a Political Elite: The Upper House in
the Revolutionary Era,” ibid., XXVH (1964), 147-158. The point will be
elaborated in a forthcoming book.
“Strafford County, which contained the commercial center of Dover,
extended north through what are now Belknap and Carroll Counties, then
just under settlement.
330 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
lature also changed. All but four of the 1765 legislators can be
identified, but more than one fifth of the post-war representatives
are obscure, and the parentage of very few can be established
despite the existence of many town histories, genealogies, and
published records. Before the war fewer than one third were
farmers, exclusive of large landowners but including the men
whose occupation is doubtful; by 1786 at least 50 per cent were
yeomen and if those whose occupations are unknown are added,
as most of them should be, the proportion rises to over 70 per
cent. Merchants and lawyers, who had furnished about one third
of the members of the 1765 legislature, now comprised only one
tenth of the membership. Similarly men of wealth totalled one
third of the former legislature but less than one tenth of the
latter. The well-to-do element who had dominated the prewar
Assembly with 70 per cent of the seats were now reduced to a
minority of about 30 per cent. Thus a very large majority of the
new legislature consisted of ordinary farmers who had only
moderate properties. Ten members of the prominent old families
had seats in the 1765 house; by 1786 there were only four in a
body two and one half times as large. Even if the newly-repre¬
sented towns are eliminated, the trend toward the election of
less wealthy and less distinguished representatives remains the
same, though the degree of change was less. If only the towns
which sent men to both legislatures are considered, one finds that
whereas farmers formed between 20 and 30 per cent in 1765,
they accounted for 55 to 67 per cent twenty years later. Similarly,
in these towns the proportion of representatives having moderate
properties rose from 30 per cent to more than twice that. Thus
the economic and social character of the members in the lower
house had been radically changed.
The pattern of change was much the same in other states. New
York’s society was fundamentally less egalitarian than that of
New Hampshire, having more men with large estates and propor¬
tionately fewer areas dominated by small farmers. The agricultural
upcountry had not yet extended much beyond Albany to the
north and Schenectady to the west, so that most New Yorkers still
lived in the older counties. As might be expected the changes
which occurred in New York were not as striking as in New
Hampshire but they were still obvious. By 1785 the counties west
of the Hudson, together with those north of Westchester, in¬
creased their representation from about one third to nearly two
thirds of the total. That fact alone might not have guaranteed a
social or economic change in the composition of the Assembly,
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 331
for every county had its upper class, but the new legislature
differed from the old in many respects. The voters selected far
fewer townspeople. In the 1769 Assembly some 57 per cent of
the members had been engaged primarily in a nonagricultural
occupation; by 1785 the proportion had been halved. Farmers,
exclusive of large landowners, had made up 25 per cent of the
total in 1769; now they furnished about 42 per cent. 16 In contrast,
one half of the 1769 legislators had been merchants and lawyers,
but now such men held less than one third of the seats. Similarly
the proportion of wealthy members dropped from 43 per cent
to 15 per cent, whereas the ratio of men of moderate means in¬
creased from probably one seventh to nearly one half. New
York’s elite families, which had contributed ten out of twenty-
eight Assemblymen in 1769, contributed the same number in
1785, but in a House twice as large. Meanwhile the number of
men who had started without any local family background, new¬
comers to New York, increased from two to twenty-three. In
general, the yeoman-artisan "middle class,” which in colonial
days had furnished a half-dozen members, now actually had a
majority in the legislature. Under the leadership of George Clinton
and others of higher economic and social rank, they controlled
the state during the entire decade of the eighties. 17 In New York,
as in New Hampshire, the trend was the same even within those
counties which had been represented before the Revolution. If
Washington and Montgomery counties are eliminated, the pro¬
portion of delegates who were well-to-do declines from 86 per
cent to 60 per cent.
New Jersey’s lower house, the size of which had increased
in stages from twenty members to thirty-nine after the Revolution,
retained equal distribution of seats between East and West
Jersey. As in New Hampshire and New York, the economic upper
class of well-to-do men, which in New Jersey had held three
fourths of the seats before the war, saw its control vanish; indeed
two thirds of the states’ representatives in 1785 had only moderate
10 So many men in the 1785 legislature are obscure that the figure cannot
be exact, but it is a safe assumption that those who lived in the country
and whose occupations axe not given in local histories, genealogies, or other
published sources, were farmers. Ordinarily men of importance, or business
and professional men, are discussed in such sources, so that if one con¬
scientiously searches the published materials, including of course the wills,
most of those men who remain unidentified can be confidently termed
farmers of moderate property.
17 As far as the fathers of these legislators could be identified, 12 of the
prewar 28 were merchants, lawyers, and large landowners, as were 12 or
possibly 13 of the postwar 66.
33^ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
properties. The typical legislator before the war held at least
1,000 acres; in 1785 the median was about 300 acres. Merchants
and lawyers were all but eliminated from the legislature, retaining
only a half-dozen seats. The colonial elite, once controlling one
third of the votes of the house, now had one eighth; the over¬
whelming majority of the new legislators were men who had
been unknown before the war and whose ancestry, where ascer¬
tainable, was uniformly undistinguished. Fully two thirds of the
representatives were ordinary farmers, presumably men of more
than average ability and sometimes with military experience,
but clearly part of the common people. Again these changes
occurred not just because new areas were represented but because
the counties which had sent delegates in the prewar years now
chose different sort of men. In New Jersey, the counties of
Cumberland, Salem, Hunterdon, Morris, and Sussex had previ¬
ously been underrepresented. If these are eliminated, we find
that the proportion of men of moderate property rose from 20
per cent to 73 per cent and of farmers (exclusive of large land-
owners) from 23.5 per cent to 60 per cent. 18
Southern legislatures were also democratized. Maryland’s House
of Delegates expanded to seventy-four by 1785, with the addition
of a few members from the western counties. As had been true
before the war, most of the representatives were engaged in
agriculture, the proportion of those with a nonfarm occupation
remaining constant at about 20 per cent. The most obvious
change in economic composition was the replacement of planters
by farmers, of large property owners by men with moderate es¬
tates. If the planter is defined as one who held at least twenty
slaves or 500 acres, then they formed 57 per cent of the House
in 1765 and only 36.5 per cent in 1785, while the farmers
increased from 18.5 to 28 per cent. Wealthy men occupied
about two fifths of the seats in the pre-Revolutionary period, one
sixth after the war, while delegates with moderate property, who
had previously formed only one fifth of the total, now comprised
one third. The yeoman farmer class, though still lacking a
majority, had doubled in numbers while members of the old
ruling families, in turn, saw their strength halved. 19 By com-
^hose of unknown property or occupation are excluded.
18 The proportion of self-made men in the House seems to have increased
from one fifth to one fourth, but information on the delegates’ fathers is
too incomplete for precision. Material on land and slave ownership is drawn
from manuscript census and tax records as well as from the usual secondary
materials. The median acreage declined from 1,400 acres to 1,000 acres; the
median number of slaves owned decreased from about 40 to 20. My figures
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 333
paxison with the northern states the shift of power was decidedly
less radical, but the change was considerable. It was made more
obvious, incidentally, by the great contrast between the postwar
House of Delegates and the postwar Senate, for the large majority
of the Senators were wealthy merchants, lawyers, and planters,
who fought bitterly with the popular branch.
The planter class of Virginia, like that of Maryland, did not
intend that the Revolution should encourage democracy, but it
was unable to prevent some erosion of its power. The great land-
owners still controlled the lower house, though their strength
was reduced from 60 per cent to 50 per cent, while that of ordi¬
nary farmers rose from perhaps 13 per cent in 1773 to 26 per
cent in 1785. An important change was the decline in the number
of wealthy members, who now held one quarter instead of one
half of the seats. Power thus shifted into the hands of the lesser
planters, the well-to-do rather than the wealthy. Meanwhile men
with moderate properties doubled their share, almost equaling
in number the wealthy Burgesses. Similarly the sons of the First
Families lost their commanding position, while an even larger
fraction of delegates were of humble origins. The general magni¬
tude of the change is suggested by the decline in the median
property held from 1,800 acres to about 1,100, and from forty
slaves to twenty. 20
Thus, although the planter class retained control of the Burges¬
ses, the people were now sending well-to-do rather than wealthy
men, and at least one out of four representatives was an ordinary
citizen. A roll call of the House would still recite the familiar
names of many elite families, but it would also pronounce some
never heard before. The alteration in the composition of the
Virginia legislature undoubtedly sprang in part from the growing
influence of westerners, for counties beyond the Blue Ridge sent
many more representatives in 1785 than before the war, while
the representation from the Piedmont also increased in size. How¬
ever, the same shift downward also occurred within the older
counties, those which had been represented in 1773. If we elimi¬
nate from consideration all of the newly-formed counties, we find
that delegates with moderate property increased from 13.5 per
are on two thirds of the men. Charles A. Barker gives 2,400 acres as the
average for the 1771 legislature. The Background of the Revolution in
Maryland (New Haven, 1940), 384.
20 Data for land was obtained on 78 per cent of the 1773 Burgesses and
83 per cent of the delegates in the 1785 house. Percentages for slaves are 70
and 86 respectively. Tax lists beginning in 1782 were the most important
source, supplemented by probate records and statements in secondary sources.
334 reinterpretation of the American revolution
cent, and that wealthy ones declined from 48 to 30 per cent,
while the proportion of farmers rose from 13 to about 25 per
cent.
The South Carolina constitution of 1778 is noted as an expres-
sion of conservatism. Its conservatism, however, was much more
evident with respect to the Senate than to the House of Repre¬
sentatives, which was now nearly four times as large. Although
the eastern upper class refused to grant westerners as many seats
in the House as were warranted by their population, the up-
country did increase its share from not more than 6 or 8 per
cent (depending on one's definition of where the upcountry
started) to nearly 40 per cent. The urban upper class of mer¬
chants, lawyers, and doctors dropped to 20 per cent of the total
membership in 1785, as compared to 36 per cent in 1765. The
agricultural interest greatly increased its influence, the principal
gain being made by farmers rather than by planters. A significant
change was a reduction in the strength of wealthy representatives,
who made up four fifths of those whose property is known in
1765 and but one third twenty years later. The pre-Revolutionary
House of Commons seems to have contained not a single man of
moderate property, but the postwar representatives included more
than fifty such—probably over 30 per cent of the membership.
The median acreage held by the 1765 members was certainly
over 2,000 and probably a majority owned over 100 slaves each.
The lack of tax records makes it impossible to determine what
land the 1785 representatives held, but they obviously owned
much less; while the median number of slaves was about twenty-
five. The scarcity of such records as well as of genealogies and
other historical materials also makes it exceedingly difficult to
identify any but fairly prominent men. This situation in itself
lends significance to the fact that whereas before the Revolution
the desired information is available for seven out of eight represen¬
tatives and even for over two thirds of their parents, data are
incomplete concerning 30 per cent of the postwar delegates and
most of their parents. Equally significant is the different social
make-up of the two bodies. The long-established upper class of
the province controlled half of the 1765 house, but less than one
fourth of the 1785 legislature. Although most of the representatives
were well-to-do, the house was no longer an exclusively aristo¬
cratic body, but contained a sizable element of democracy. It
should be pointed out that South Carolina was peculiar in that
the change in the House was due almost entirely to the admis-
sion of new delegates from the west. In those parishes which
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 335
elected representatives both before and after the war, the pro¬
portion of wealthy delegates decreased very slightly, while that
of men with moderate property rose from zero to between 7 and
14 per cent.
All of the six legislatures had been greatly changed as a result
of the Revolution. The extent of that change varied from moder¬
ate in Virginia and Maryland to radical in New Hampshire and
New Jersey, but everywhere the same process occurred. Voters
were choosing many more representatives than before the war,
and the newly settled areas gained considerably in representatives.
The locus of power had shifted from the coast into the interior.
Voters were ceasing to elect only men of wealth and family. The
proportion of the wealthy in these legislatures dropped from 46
per cent to 22 per cent; members of the prominent old families
declined from 40 per cent to 16 per cent. Most of these came
from the long-established towns or commercial farm areas. Of
course many men who were well-to-do or better continued to gain
office, but their share decreased from four fifths to just one half.
Even in Massachusetts the percentage of legislators who were
wealthy or well-to-do dropped from 50 per cent in 1765 to 21.5
per cent in 1784. 21
Significantly, the people more and more often chose ordinary
yeomen or artisans. Before the Revolution fewer than one out of
five legislators had been men of that sort; after independence
they more than doubled their strength, achieving in fact a major¬
ity in the northern houses and constituting over 40 per cent
generally. The magnitude of the change is suggested by the fact
that the legislators of the postwar South owned only about one
half as much property as their predecessors. Also suggestive is
the great increase in the proportion of men of humble origin,
which seems to have more than doubled. Therefore men who were
or had once been a part of the demos totalled about two thirds
a .Economic status of Massachusetts Representatives (percentages)
1765
1784 duplicate towns
1784 total
wealthy
17
8
6.5
well-to-do
33
17
15
moderate
40
55
51.5
unknown
10
20
27
Probably most of those whose property is unknown had only moderate
incomes. Similarly the proportion of men from prominent old families
dropped from 22 per cent to 6 per cent, college educated delegates from 27
per cent to 9 per cent, and representatives whose fathers were well-to-do
from 30 per cent to 10 per cent, the change being greatest in the new towns
but occurring everywhere.
336 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Table I. economic status of the representatives®
N.H., N.Y.,
and N.J.
Md., Va.,
and S.C.
Prewar Postwar Prewar
(percentages) (percentages) (percentages)
Postwar
(percentages)
Wealthy
36
12
52
28
Well-to-do
47
26
36
42
Moderate
Merchants &
17
62
12
30
lawyers
43
18
22.5
17
Farmers
23
55
12
26
® This table analyzes the property of about 900 representatives. The economic status of
85 per cent was discovered with reasonable certainty. Most of the rest were dealt with by
informed guesswork. No one was admitted to the wealthy category unless their property
was certainly known. Lawyers were assumed to be well-to-do, for almost all of them were.
Merchants were also considered well-to-do if they lived in an important urban center, but
inland shopkeepers were not. Doctors and judges were distributed on similar principles.
Artisans were almost always of moderate property. Farmers and those whose occupation
was unknown composed the two largest groups. Those who came from the inland, semi¬
subsistence communities were almost never well-to-do, the exceptions being conspicuous
men, so that if nothing was discovered about them they were almost certainly of moderate
means. On the other hand those who lived in the well-developed commercial farm areas
were often well-to-do, so they were not assigned to any category unless other information
was available. The basis for this procedure was derived from extensive study of property
holdings as discussed in my Social Structure of Revolutionary America. By such an analysis
the proportion of unknowns was reduced to 3% per cent, most of whom were probably
of moderate property. They are e l iminated in the table. Percentages for occupation are
less accurate, especially those for the postwar South.
of the whole number of representatives. Clearly the voters had
ceased to confine themselves to an elite, but were selecting instead
men like themselves. The tendency to do so had started during
the colonial period, especially in the North, and had now increased
so dramatically as almost to revolutionize the legislatures. The
process occurred also in those areas which were represented
both before and after the Revolution, as compared with those
which were allowed to choose delegates for the first time after
the war.
Although a similar change may not have taken place in Connec¬
ticut or Rhode Island, it surely did so in the states of Pennsylvania,
Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia, which have not been
analyzed here.
Table H. economic status of the representatives from
pre-revolutionary districts
N.H., N.Y., and NJ.
Md., Va.
, and S.C.
Prewar
Postwar
Prewar
Postwar
Wealthy
35
18
50
38
Well-to-do
45
37
38
42
Moderate
20
45
12
20
Merchants & lawyers
41
24
22
18.5
Farmers
25
50
12
22
JACKSON TURNER MAIN 337
The significance of the change may be more obvious to his¬
torians than it was to men of the Revolutionary era. Adherents
of the Whig philosophy deplored the trend. They continued to
demand a government run by the elite in which the democratic
element, while admitted, was carefully checked. Such men were
basically conservatives who conceived themselves as struggling
for liberty against British tyranny, and who did not propose to
substitute a democratical tyranny for a monarchical one. 22 The
states, observed a philosophical New Englander in 1786, were
"worse governed” than they had been because “men of sense and
property have lost much of their influence by the popular spirit
of the war.” The people had once respected and obeyed their
governors, senators, judges, and clergy. But “since the war,
blustering ignorant men, who started into notice during the
troubles and confusion of that critical period, have been attempt¬
ing to push themselves into office.” 23
On the other hand democratic spokesmen now rose to defend
this new government by the people. A writer in a Georgia news¬
paper rejoiced in 1789 that the state’s representatives were “taken
from a class of citizens who hitherto have thought it more for
their interest to be contented with a humbler walk in life,” and
hoped that men of large property would not enter the state, for
Georgia had “perhaps the most compleat democracy in the known
world,” which could be preserved only by economic equality. 24
In Massachusetts as early as 1775 “Democritus” urged the voters
to “choose men that have learnt to get their living by honest
industry, and that will be content with as small an income as the
generality of those who pay them for their service. If you would
be well represented,” he continued, “choose a man in middling
circumstances as to worldly estate, if he has got it by his industry
so much the better, he knows the wants of the poor, and can
judge pretty well what the community can bear of public burdens,
if he be a man of good common understanding.” 25 “A Farmer”
^Illustrations of this antidemocratic bias among Whig spokesmen are
numerous, e.g., “A faithful Friend to his Country,” Independent Chronicle
(Boston), August 7, 1777; “The Free Republican,” Boston Magazine, August
1784, pp. 420-423; “Constitutionalist,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford),
April 10, 1786; “Honestus,” Vermont Gazette (Bennington), September 18,
1786; “Lycurgus,” Massachusetts Spy (Worcester), July 12, 26, August 2,
1775; Samuel Chase, Md. Gazette, December 11, 1777; “Agricola,” Pennsyl¬
vania Packet (Philadelphia), February 6, 1779; “A Citizen of New Jersey,”
New Jersey Gazette (Trenton), October 10, 1785; and Falmouth Gazette,
September 17, 1785.
23 American Herald (Boston), December 11, 1786.
24 Gazette of the State of Georgia (Savannah), January 1, 1789.
^Massachusetts Spy, July 5, 1775.
33$ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
in Connecticut boldly declared it a maxim that the people usually
judged rightly, insisted that politics was not so difficult but that
common sense could comprehend it, and argued that every free¬
man could be a legislator. 26
The change in men might be deprecated or applauded, but it
could not be denied, and some found it good. To Jedidiah Morse
the government of Virginia still seemed to be “oligarchical or
aristocratical, 27 but to a Virginian a revolution had taken place.
The newly-chosen House of Burgesses, wrote Roger Atkinson in
1776, was admirable. It was “composed of men not quite so well
dressed, nor so politely educated, nor so highly bom as some
Assemblies I have formerly seen,” yet on the whole he liked it
better. “They are the People’s men (and the People in general
are right). They are plain and of consequence less disguised,
but I believe to the full as honest, less intriguing, more sincere. I
wish the People may always have Virtue enough and Wisdom
enough to chuse such plain men.” 28 Democracy, for a moment
at least, seemed to have come to Virginia.
The American Revolution:
The People as Constituent Power
R. R. PALMER
If it be asked what the American Revolution distinctively con¬
tributed to the world’s stock of ideas, the answer might go some¬
what along these lines. It did not contribute primarily a social
doctrine for although a certain skepticism toward social rank
was an old American attitude, and possibly even a gift to man-
*We e kly Monitor (Litchfield), August 6, 1787. For two more examples
^ Watchman/ Pa. Packet , June 10, 17, 1776; and Maryland Journal,
ana Baltimore Advertiser , February 18, 1777.
ag^Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography . . . (2d ed., London, 1792),
B^raph^XV ^1908)^357°^ ^ 1?76 ’ ViT9inia Magazine of History and
. Repnnted wiih permission from The Age of the Democratic Revolution:
A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800. Volume One: The
ESity PretT et<m ’ 1959> ’ 213_235 - ^ © 1959 by Princeton
R. R. PALMER 339
kind, it long antedated the Revolution, which did not so much
cut down, as prevent the growth of, an aristocracy of European
type. It did not especially contribute economic ideas—for the
Revolution had nothing to teach on the production or distribution
of goods, and the most advanced parties objected to private wealth
only when it became too closely associated with government.
They aimed at a separation of economic and political spheres,
by which men of wealth, while free to get rich, should not have a
disproportionate influence on government, and, on the other
hand, government and public emoluments should not be used
as a means of livelihood for an otherwise impecunious and
unproductive upper class.
The American Revolution was a political movement, concerned
with liberty, and with power. Most of the ideas involved were
by no means distinctively American. There was nothing peculiarly
American in the concepts, purely as concepts, of natural liberty
and equality. They were admitted by conservatives, and were
taught in the theological faculty at the Sorbonne. 1 Nor could
Americans claim any exclusive understanding of the ideas of
government by contract or consent, or the sovereignty of the
people, or political representation, or the desirability of independ¬
ence from foreign rule, or natural rights, or the difference be¬
tween natural law and positive law, or between certain funda¬
mental laws and ordinary legislation, or the separation of powers,
or the federal union of separate states. All these ideas were
perfectly familiar in Europe, and that is why the American Revo¬
lution was of such interest to Europeans.
The Distinctiveness of American Political Ideas
The most distinctive work of the Revolution was in finding a
method, and furnishing a model, for putting these ideas into
practical effect. It was in the implementation of similar ideas
1 See on Real de Curb an my Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth
Century France (Princeton, 1939), 126, quoting L. J. Hooke, Religionis
naturalis et moralis philosophiae principia, methodo scholastica digesta
(Paris, 1752-1754), I, 623-624: “Status is a permanent condition of
man, involving various rights and a long series of obligations. It is
either natural, constituted by nature itself, or adventitious, arising from
some human act or institution. . . . By the status of nature we understand
that in which men would be who were subject to no government but joined
only by similarity of nature or by private pacts. ... In the status of nature
all men are equal and enjoy the same rights. For in that state they are
distinguished only by the gifts of mind or body by which some excel others.”
Italics are the Abbe Hooke's.
34° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that Americans were more successful than Europeans. “In the
last fifty years,” wrote General Bonaparte to Citizen Talleyrand
in 1797, “there is only one thing that I can see that we have
really defined, and that is the sovereignty of the people. But we
have had no more success in determining what is constitutional,
than in allocating the different powers of government.” And he
said more peremptorily, on becoming Emperor in 1804, that the
time had come “to constitute the Nation.” He added: “I am the
constituent power.” 2
The problem throughout much of America and Europe, for half
a century, was to “constitute” new government, and in a measure
new societies. The problem was to find a constituent power.
Napoleon offered himself to Europe in this guise. The Americans
solved the problem by the device of the constitutional convention,
which, revolutionary in origin, soon became institutionalized in
the public law of the United States. 8
. '^ ie constitutional convention in theory embodied the sover-
eignty of the people. The people chose it for a specific purpose,
not to govern, but to set up institutions of government. The con¬
vention, acting as the sovereign people, proceeded to draft a
constitution and a declaration of rights. Certain “natural” or
inalienable rights of the citizen were thus laid down at the
same time as the powers of government. It was the constitution
that created the powers of government, defined their scope, gave
them legality, and balanced them one against another. The
constitution was written and comprised in a single document.
The constitution and accompanying declaration, drafted by the
convention, must, in the developed theory, be ratified by the
people. The convention thereupon disbanded and disappeared,
lest its members have a vested interest in the offices they created.’
The constituent power went into abeyance, leaving the work of
government to the authorities now constituted. The people, having
exercised sovereignty, now came under government. Having made
law, they came under law. They put themselves voluntarily under
restraint. At the same time, they put restraint upon government.
government was limited government; all public authority must
keep within the bounds of the constitution and of the declared
rights. There were two levels of law, a higher law or constitution
m ,P “- 1859 >' «• *•. **— .
Constitutional History of the United States,1776-1826 > (l?Y.f 1939)!
R. R. PALMER 341
that only the people could make or amend, through constitutional
conventions or bodies similarly empowered; and a statutory law,
to be made and unmade, within the assigned limits, by legislators
to whom the constitution gave this function.
Such was the theory, and it was a distinctively American one.
European thinkers, in all their discussion of a political or social
contract, of government by consent and of sovereignty of the
people, had not clearly imagined the people as actually contriving
a constitution and creating the organs of government. They lacked
the idea of the people as a constituent power. Even in the French
Revolution the idea developed slowly; members of the French
National Assembly, long after the Tennis Court oath, continued
to feel that the constitution which they were writing, to be valid,
had to be accepted by the King as a kind of equal with whom
the nation had to negotiate. Nor, indeed, would the King tolerate
any other view. On the other hand, we have seen how at Geneva
in 1767 the democrats advanced an extreme version of citizen
sovereignty, holding that the people created the constitution and
the public offices by an act of will; but they failed to get beyond
a simple direct democracy; they had no idea of two levels of law,
or of limited government, or of a delegated and representative
legislative authority, or of a sovereign people which, after acting
as a god from the machine in a constituent convention, retired
to the more modest status of an electorate, and let its theoretical
sovereignty become inactive.
The difficulty with the theory was that the conditions under
which it could work were seldom present. No people really starts
de novo; some political institutions always already exist; there
is never a tabula rasa , or state of nature, or Chart Blanche as
Galloway posited for conservative purposes. Also, it is difficult
for a convention engaged in writing a constitution not to be
embroiled in daily politics and problems of government. And it
is hard to live voluntarily under restraint. In complex societies,
or in times of crisis, either government or people or some part
of the people may feel obliged to go beyond the limits that a
constitution has laid down.
In reality, the idea of the people as a constituent power, with
its corollaries, developed unclearly, gradually, and sporadically
during the American Revolution. It was adumbrated in the Dec¬
laration of Independence: the people may "institute new govem-
ment.” Jefferson, among the leaders, perhaps conceived the idea
most clearly. It is of especial interest, however, to see how the
"people” themselves, that is, certain lesser and unknown or
342- REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
poorer or unsatisfied persons, contributed to these distinctive
American ideas by their opposition to the Revolutionary elite.
There were naturally many Americans who felt that no change
was needed except expulsion of the British. With the disappear¬
ance of the British governors, and collapse of the old governor’s
councils, the kind of men who had been active in the colonial
assemblies, and who now sat as provincial congresses or other
de facto revolutionary bodies, were easily inclined to think that
they should keep the management of affairs in their own hands.
Some parallel can be seen with what happened in Europe. There
was a revolution, or protest, of constituted bodies against author¬
ities set above them, and a more popular form of revolution, or
protest, which aimed at changing the character or membership
of these constituted bodies themselves. As at Geneva the General
Council rebelled against the patriciate, without wishing to admit
new citizens to the General Council; as in Britain the Whigs
asserted the powers of Parliament against the King, without
wishing to change the composition of Parliament; as in Belgium,
in 1789, the Estates party declared independence from the Em¬
peror, while maintaining the preexisting estates; as in France,
also in 1789, the nobility insisted that the King govern through
the Estates-General, but objected to the transformation of the
three estates into a new kind of national body; as in the Dutch
provinces in 1795 the Estates-General, after expelling the Prince
of Orange, tried to remain itself unchanged, and resisted the
election of a "convention”; so, in America in 1776, the assemblies
that drove out the officers of the King, and governed their
respective states under revolutionary conditions, sought to keep
control of affairs in their own hands, and to avoid reconstitution
at the hands of the "people.”
Ten states gave themselves new constitutions in 1776 and
1777. In nine of these states, however, it was the ordinary
assembly, that is, the revolutionary government of the day, that
drafted and proclaimed the constitution. In the tenth, Pennsyl¬
vania, a constituent convention met, but it soon had to take on
the burden of daily government in addition. In Connecticut and
Rhode Island the colonial charters remained in force, and the
authorities constituted in colonial times (when governors and
councils had already been elected) remained unchanged in
principle for half a century. In Massachusetts the colonial charter
remained in effect until 1780.
Thus in no state, when independence was declared, did a
true constituent convention meet, and, as it were, calmly and
R. R. PALMER 343
rationally devise government out of a state of nature. There
was already, however, some recognition of the principle that
constitutions cannot be made merely by governments, that a
more fundamental power is needed to produce a constitution than
to pass ordinary laws or carry on ordinary executive duties. Thus,
in New Hampshire, New York, Delaware, Maryland, North
Carolina, and Georgia, the assemblies drew up constitutions only
after soliciting authority for that purpose from the voters. In
Maryland and North Carolina there was a measure of popular
ratification.
Constitution-Making in North Carolina,
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts
The popular pressures that helped to form American political
doctrine are best illustrated from North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
and Massachusetts. 4
In North Carolina class lines had been sharply drawn by the
Regulator movement and its suppression. The people of the back-
country even inclined to be loyalist, not eager for an independence
that might only throw them into the hands of the county gentry.
In the turbulent election of October 1776 the voters knew that
the assembly which they elected would draft a state constitution.
There was no demand for a convention to act exclusively and
temporarily as a constituent power. But several counties drew up
instructions for the deputies, in which the emerging doctrine was
set forth clearly.
Orange and Mecklenburg counties used identical language.
This is a sign, as in the case of identical phrasing in the French
cahiers of 1789, where the matter has been carefully studied,
that some person of influence and education, and not some poor
farmer ruminating in his cabin, had probably written out a draft.
Still, the public meetings of both counties found it to their taste.
“Political power,” they said, “is of two kinds, one principal and
superior, the other derived and inferior. . . . The principal supreme
power is possessed only by the people at large. . . . The derived
and inferior power by the servants which they employ. . . . The
rules by which the inferior power is exercised are to be con-
4 Here I am indebted, without sharing all his conclusions, to E. P. Douglass,
Rebels and Democrats: the Struggle for Equal Political Rights and Majority
Rule during the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955).
344 reinterpretation of the American revolution
stituted by the principal supreme power. . . .” 5 In other words,
government was not a form of guardianship. Office was to be no
longer a perquisite of the gentry, or "an aristocracy of power in
the hands of the rich,” to use their own language, but a form
of employment by the people, whom they did not hesitate to
call "the poor.” Mecklenburg favored a unicameral legislature.
Orange a bicameral one, but both called for a separation of
powers. It was not that any organ of government should enjoy
independence from the electorate (the essence of balance-of-
power theory in the European, British, and loyalist view), but
rather that the various functions of government should be defined
and distributed among different men, to prevent what had
happened in colonial times. The fact that before 1776 the council
had possessed executive, legislative, and judicial functions, and
that members of the assembly had served as justices of the peace,
or had their relatives appointed judges and sheriffs, was the
basis on which North Carolina had been dominated by small
groups of gentry. It was popular objection to this situation, prob¬
ably more than a reading of European books, that made the
separation of powers a principal American doctrine.
The North Carolina constitution, as written and adopted, en¬
larged the electorate by granting all taxpayers the right to vote for
members of the lower house. It equalized the representation by
giving more deputies to the western counties. It required a free¬
hold of 100 acres for members of the lower house, and of 300
acres for those of the upper house, who were to be elected only
by voters possessing 50 acres. The governor, elected by the two
houses, had to have a freehold worth £1,000. The constitution
was a compromise between populace and landed gentry. It lasted
until the Civil War. 6
The situation in Pennsylvania was complex. The Quaker colony,
idealized by European intellectuals as the heaven of innocent
equality and idyllic peace, had long been plagued by some of the
most acrimonious politics in America. Quaker bigwigs had long
clashed with the non-Quaker lesser orders of Philadelphia and the
West. In the spring of 1776 Pennsylvania was the only colony
in which the assembly was still legal under the old law. It still
showed a desire for reconciliation with England, and, with it,
maintenance of the old social and political system. This persist-
*lbid., 126.
6 For the text of the constitutions, see F. N. Thorpe, Federal and State
Constitutions , Colonial Charters and Other Organic Laws of the . . . United
States of America (Washington, 7 vols., 1909).
R. R. PALMER 345
ence of conservatism in high places made a great many people
all the more radical. A year of open war with Britain had aroused
the determination for independence, and in May 1776 a mass
meeting of 4,000 people in Philadelphia demanded the calling of
a constitutional convention. Various local committees got to work,
and a convention was elected by irregular methods. Where the
three eastern counties had formerly been heavily over-represented,
the situation was now not equalized, but reversed. The West, with
the same population as the three eastern counties, had 64 dele¬
gates in the convention to only 24 for the East. "The Convention
in Pennsylvania was a political expedient, and not, as in Massa¬
chusetts, the cornerstone of constitutional government.” 7 Its real
function was to promote the Revolution, and assure independence
from England, by circumventing the assembly and all other oppo¬
sition. Like the more famous French Convention elected in 1792,
it rested on a kind of popular mandate which did not reflect an
actual majority of the population; like it, it became the govern¬
ment of the country during war and revolution; like it, it behaved
dictatorially. The constitutions drafted in Pennsylvania in 1776,
and in France in 1793, were, in their formal provisions, by far
the most democratic of any produced in the eighteenth century.
The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, unlike the French consti¬
tution of the Year I, was never submitted even to the formalities
of popular ratification. But the two constitutions became a symbol
of what democrats meant by democracy.
The Pennsylvania constitution vested legislative power in a
single house. For the executive it avoided the name and office
of governor, entrusting executive power to a council and "presi¬
dent,” a word which then meant no more than chairman. All male
taxpayers twenty-one years of age had the vote, and were eligible
for any office. To sit in the assembly, however, it was necessary
publicly to acknowledge the divine inspiration of the Old and New
Testaments. Voters elected the legislators, the executive council¬
lors, sheriffs, coroners, tax-assessors, and justices of the peace.
Voting was by ballot. The president was chosen by the legislature
and the executive council; he had no veto or appointive powers,
and what powers he did have he could exercise only in agreement
with his council. All officers were elected for one year, except that
councillors served for three. Rotation of office was provided for;
legislators, councillors, president, and sheriffs could be reelected
only a certain number of times. Doors of the legislative assembly
7 Douglass, op. cit.y 260.
346 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
must always be open to the public. There was a kind of referen¬
dum, in that no bill passed by the assembly, short of emergency,
became law until submitted for public consideration and enacted
in the assembly of the following year, if there was no public objec¬
tion. Officeholders received pay, but if revenues of any office be¬
came too large the assembly could reduce them. All officers and
judges could be impeached by the assembly. Judges of the Su¬
preme Court could be removed by the assembly for "misbehavior.”
There was an elected council of censors, or board of review, which
every seven years ascertained whether the constitution had been
preserved inviolate, and called a convention if amendment seemed
necessary.
The Pennsylvania constitution represented the doctrine of a
single party, namely the democrats, people of the kind who had
formerly had little to do with government, and whose main prin¬
ciple was that government should never become a separate or
vested interest within the state. This was indeed an understand¬
able principle, at a time when government, in all countries in
varying degree, had in fact become the entrenched interest of a
largely hereditary governing class. The Pennsylvania constitution
substituted almost a direct democracy, in which no one in govern¬
ment could carry any responsibility or pursue any sustained pro¬
gram of his own. Many people in Pennsylvania objected to it from
the beginning. It must be remembered that the democratic con¬
stitution did not signify that Pennsylvania was really more demo¬
cratic than some of the other states; it signified, rather, that
Pennsylvania was more divided, and that conservatism was
stronger, certain upper-class and politically experienced elements,
which elsewhere took a leading part in the Revolution, being in
Pennsylvania tainted with Anglophilism. Whether the constitution
of 1776 was workable or not, these people soon put an end to it.
It lasted only until 1790. 8
The most interesting case is that of Massachusetts. Here the
great political thinker was John Adams, who became the main
author of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, which in turn
had an influence on the Constitution of the United States. In his
own time Adams was denounced as an Anglomaniac and a
Monocrat. In our own time some sympathizers with the eighteenth-
century democrats have considered him very conservative, while
on the other hand theorists of the "new conservatism” would
8 Ibid 214—286; J. P. Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: a
Study in Revolutionary Democracy (Philadelphia, 1936).
R. R. PALMER 347
persuade us that John Adams was in truth the American Edmund
Burke. I confess that I see very little in any of these allegations.
Adams in January 1776 published some Thoughts on Govern¬
ment, for the guidance of those in the various colonies who
were soon to declare independence and begin to govern them¬
selves. This was in some ways a conservative tract. Adams
thought it best, during the war, for the new states simply to
keep the forms of government that they had. He obviously ap¬
proved the arrangement under the Massachusetts charter of
1691, by which the popular assembly elected an upper house
or council. In other ways he was not very conservative. He de¬
clared, like Jefferson, that the aim of government is welfare or
happiness, that republican institutions must rest on “virtue,” and
that the people should support a universal system of public
schools. He wanted one-year terms for governors and officials
(the alternative would be “slavery”), and he favored rotation of
office. He quite agreed that someday the state governors and
councillors might be popularly elected, as they were in Connecti¬
cut already. He gave six reasons for having a bicameral legis¬
lature, but in none of these six reasons did he show any fear
of the people, or belief that, with a unicameral legislature, the
people would plunder property or degenerate into anarchy. He
was afraid of the one-house legislature itself. He never committed
the folly of identifying the deputies with the deputizers. He was
afraid that a single house would be arbitrary or capricious, or
make itself perpetual, or “make laws for their own interest, and
adjudge all controversies in their own favor.” 9 He himself cited
the cases of Holland and the Long Parliament. The fear of a self-
perpetuating political body, gathering privileges to itself, was cer¬
tainly better grounded in common observation than vague alarms
about anarchy or pillage.
The Thoughts of 1776 were conservative in another way, if con¬
servatism be the word. Adams had not yet conceived the idel of a
constitutional convention. He lacked the notion of the people as
constituent power. He had in mind that existing assemblies would
draft the new constitutions, when and if any were drafted. Adams
was familiar with all the high-level political theory of England
and Europe. But the idea of the people as the constituent power
arose locally, from the grass roots.
The revolutionary leadership in Massachusetts, including both
Adamses, was quite satisfied to be rid of the British, and otherwise
Q Works (1851), IV, 196.
34$ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
to keep the Bay State as it had always been. They therefore “re¬
sumed” the charter of 1691. They simply undid the Massachusetts
Government Act of 1774. Some of the commonalty of Boston, and
farmers of Concord and the western towns, envisaged further
changes. It is hard to say what they wanted, except that they
wanted a new constitution. Experts in Massachusetts history con¬
tradict each other flatly; some say that debtors, poor men, and
Baptists were dissatisfied; others that all kinds of diverse people
naturally owed money anyway, that practically no one was too
poor to vote, and that Baptists were an infinitesimal splinter group
in a solidly Congregationalist population. It may be that the
trouble was basically psychological; that many people of fairly
low station, even though they had long had the right to vote, had
never until the Revolution participated in politics, were aroused
by the Revolution, the war, and excitement of soldiering, and,
feeling that affairs had always been managed by people socially
above them, wanted now to act politically on their own.
Demands were heard for a new constitution. It was said that
the charter of 1691 was of no force, since the royal power that
had issued it was no longer valid. It was said that no one could
be governed without his consent, and that no living person had
really consented to this charter. Some Berkshire towns even hinted
that they did not belong to Massachusetts at all until they shared
in constituting the new commonwealth. They talked of “setting
themselves apart,” or being welcomed by a neighboring state.
Echoes of the social contract floated through the western air. 'The
law to bind all must be assented to by all,” declared the farmers
of Sutton. “The Great Secret of Government is governing all by
all,” said those of Spencer. 10 It began to seem that a constitution
was necessary not only to secure liberty but to establish authority,
not only to protect the individual but to found the state.
The house of representatives proposed that it and the council,
that is, the two houses of legislation sitting together, should be
authorized by the people to draw up a constitution. All adult males
were to vote on the granting of this authorization, not merely
those possessing the customary property qualification. In a sense,
this was to recognize Rousseau's principle that there must be
“unanimity at least once”: that everyone must consent to the law
under which he was to live, even if later, when constitutional ar¬
rangements were made, a qualification was required for ordinary
voting. The council objected to a plan whereby it would lose its
identity by merging with the house. A little dispute occurred, not
10 Douglass, op. cit ., 178.
R. R. PALMER 349
unlike that in France in 1789 between "vote by head” and "vote
by order.” The plan nevertheless went through. The two houses,
sitting as one, and authorized by the people, produced a constitu¬
tion in 1778. It was submitted for popular ratification. The voters
repudiated it. Apparently both democrats and conservatives were
dissatisfied. This is precisely what happened in Holland in 1797,
when the first constitution of the Dutch revolution was rejected
by a coalition of opposite-minded voters.
A special election was therefore held, in which all towns chose
delegates to a state convention, "for the sole purpose of forming
a new Constitution.” John Adams, delegate from Braintree, was
put on the drafting committee. He wrote a draft, which the con¬
vention modified only in detail. The resulting document reflected
many influences. It is worth while to suggest a few.
There is a modem fashion for believing that Rousseau had
little influence in America, particularly on such sensible charac¬
ters as John Adams. I do not think that he had very much. Adams,
however, had read the Social Contract as early as 1765, and ulti¬
mately had four copies of it in his library. I suspect that, like
others, he found much of it unintelligible or fantastic, and some
of it a brilliant expression of his own beliefs. He himself said of
the Massachusetts constitution: "It is Locke, Sidney, Rousseau,
and de Mably reduced to practice.” 11
Adams wrote in the preamble: "The body politic is formed by
a voluntary association of individuals. It is a social compact, by
which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each
citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain
laws for the common good.” 12 The thought here, and the use of
the word "covenant,” go back to the Mayflower compact. But
whence comes the "social” in social compact? And whence comes
the word "citizen”? There were no "citizens” under the British con¬
stitution, except in the sense of freemen of the few towns known
as cities. In the English language the word "citizen” in its modern
sense is an Americanism, dating from the American Revolution. 13
It is entirely possible that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had deposited
these terms in Adams’ mind. The whole passage suggests Chapter
Works (1851), IV, 216. Adams also, in 1787, cited Rousseau’s Discourse
on Inequality and Considerations on Poland with approval, recommending
the former for its picture of the evil in civilized men, the latter for its view
that Poland was dominated exclusively by nobles. Works , IV, 409 and 367.
12 Ihid., 219; Thorpe, op. cit.. Ill, 1889.
13 This may be readily confirmed from the Oxford Dictionary, or by com¬
parison of definitions of “citizen” in British and American dictionaries, or
by tracing the article “citizen” through successive editions of the Encyclo¬
paedia Britannic a, where the modern meaning does not appear until the
eleventh edition in 1910.
350 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
vi, Book 1, of the Social Contract. The convention adopted this
part of Adams’ preamble without change.
In the enacting clause of the preamble Adams wrote: “We,
therefore, the delegates of the people of Massachusetts . . . agree
upon the following . . . Constitution of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.” The convention made a significant emendation:
"We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts . . . agree upon, ordain
and establish . . The formula. We the people ordain and estab¬
lish, expressing the developed theory of the people as constituent
power, was used for the first time in the Massachusetts constitu¬
tion of 1780, whence it passed into the preamble of the United
States constitution of 1787 and the new Pennsylvania constitution
of 1790, after which it became common in the constitutions of the
new states, and in new constitutions of the old states. Adams did
not invent the formula. He was content with the matter-of-fact or
purely empirical statement that the "delegates” had "agreed.” It
was the popularly elected convention that rose to more abstract
heights. Providing in advance for popular ratification, it imputed
the creation of government to the people.
Adams wrote, as the first article of the Declaration of Rights:
"All men are bom equally free and independent, and have certain
natural, essential and unalienable rights,” which included defense
of their lives, liberties, and property, and the seeking of "safety
and happiness.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by
George Mason in June 1776, was almost identical, and Adams cer¬
tainly had it in mind. The Massachusetts convention made only
one change in the sentence. It declared: "All men are bom free
and equal.” The convention, obviously, was thinking of the Decla¬
ration of Independence, that is, Jefferson’s more incisive rewording
of Mason’s Virginia declaration.
The convention had been elected by a true universal male
suffrage, but it adopted, following Adams’ draft, a restriction on
the franchise. To vote, under the constitution, it was necessary to
own real estate worth £3 a year, or real and personal property
of a value of £60. The charter of 1691 had specified only £2 and
£40 respectively. The state constitution was thus in this respect
more conservative than the charter. How much more conservative ?
Here we run into the difference between experts already men¬
tioned. 14 A whole school of thought, pointing to a 50 per cent
14 For emphasis on the conservative or reactionary character of the Massa¬
chusetts constitution, see Douglass, op. cit., 189-213, and more specialized
writers cited there; for the opposite view, which I follow in part, see R. E.
Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-
1780 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955), 384-400.
R. R. PALMER 35I
increase in the voting qualification, has seen a reaction of prop¬
erty-owners against dangers from below. Closer examination of
the values of money reveals that the £3 and £60 of 1780 represent
an increase of only one-eighth over the figures of 1691. Even if
half the people of Boston were unfranchised, all Boston then had
only a twentieth of the population of the state. In the rural areas,
where farm ownership was usual, it was mainly grown sons living
for a few years with their parents who lacked the vote. There
seems to have been only sporadic objection to the suffrage pro¬
vision.
Adams put into the constitution, and the convention retained it,
that ghost of King, Lords, and Commons that now assumed the
form of governor, senate, and house of representatives. Partisans of
the British system, in England or America, would surely find this
ghost highly attenuated. The point about King and Lords, in the
British system, was precisely that they were not elected by any¬
one, that they were immune to popular pressure, or any pressure,
through their enjoyment of life tenure and hereditary personal
rights to political position. Governor and senators in Massachu¬
setts, like representatives, both in Adams’ draft and in the final
document, were all elected, all by the same electorate, and all for
one-year terms. To Adams (as, for example, to Delolme), it was of
the utmost importance to prevent the executive from becoming the
mere creature of the legislature. He even wished the governor to
have an absolute veto, which the convention changed to a veto that
could be overridden by a two-thirds majority of both houses. Adams
continued to prefer a final veto. Jeffersonians and their numerous
progeny found this highly undemocratic. In all states south of
New York, at the end of the Revolution, governors were elected by
the legislative houses, and none had any veto. Adams justified
the veto as a means "to preserve the independence of the execu¬
tive and judicial departments.” 15 And since governors could no
longer be appointed by the crown, an obvious way to prevent their
dependence on legislatures was to have them issue, like legislators,
from the new sovereign, the people. It was legislative oligarchy
that Adams thought the most imminent danger. As he wrote to
Jefferson in 1787: "You are afraid of the one—1, of the few.” 16
As for the phantom ‘lords,” or senators, though they were di¬
rectly elected by the ordinary voters for one-year terms, they
were in a way supposed to represent property rather than num¬
bers. They were apportioned among the counties of Massachusetts
^Adams, Works (1851), IV, 231, and 232 note.
w Papers of Thomas Jefferson , XII (Princeton, 1955), 396.
35 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
not according to population but according to taxes paid, that is,
according to assessed value of taxable wealth. Suffolk County,
which included Boston, thus received 6 senators out of 40, where
on a purely numerical basis it would have received only four. The
Maine districts, Cape Cod, and the western counties were numeri-
cally somewhat underrepresented. The three central and western
counties received 11 senators, where a representation in propor-
tion to numbers would have given them 12 or 13. Inequalities in
wealth in Massachusetts, as between individuals or as between
city and country, were not yet great enough to make a senate
apportioned according to “property” (which included the small
man’s property as well as the rich man’s) very different from a
senate apportioned according to numbers. 17
The Massachusetts constitution prescribed certain qualifications
for eligibility. The governor was required to have a freehold worth
at least £1,000, senators a freehold of £300 or £600 total estate,
representatives a freehold of £100 or £200 total estate. (British
law at this time required £300 or £600 annual income from land
to qualify for the House of Commons.) These Massachusetts re¬
quirements resembled those in North Carolina, where the governor
had to have a £1,000 freehold, and members of the upper and
lower houses freeholds of 300 or 100 acres respectively. In the
absence of comparative statistics on land values and distribution
of land ownership in the two states, it is impossible to compare
the real impact of these legal qualifications for office. In Massa¬
chusetts, however, whatever may have been true in North Caro¬
lina, the average 100-acre one-family farm was worth well over
£300, and there were a great many such farms, so that the ordi¬
nary successful farmer could qualify for either house of the legis¬
lature, and a few well-to-do ones in almost every village might if
they chose have aspired to the office of governor. 18 The require¬
ments in Massachusetts, as set forth by John Adams, were, if
anything, Jeffersonian or agrarian in their tendency, since they
favored the farm population, and made it even harder for middle-
class townspeople, who might own no land, to occupy public office.
The aim was clearly to limit office to the substantial segment of
the population, but the substantial segment was broadly defined.
* 17 F 0I ? pare 4116 a PP ortiomne nt of senators in the Massachusetts constitution
with the population of counties in the census of 1790. The fact that the
senate represented property rather than numbers is stressed by those who
see the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 as a very conservative or reac¬
tionary document. I confess to sharing the impatience of Professor Brown
at academic theories which dissolve under a little grade-school computation.
“Brown, op. cit ., 18, 394.
R. E. PALMER 353
Still, there were people who by this definition were not "sub¬
stantial/' and some of them objected to these provisions, though
not many would in any case have ventured to run for office or
been elected if they did, in the Massachusetts of 1780.
It was Article III of the Declaration of Rights, both in Adams'
draft and in the finished constitution, that caused most debate in
the convention and most disagreement among the voters during
ratification. This article, declaring religion to be the foundation
of morality and of the state, authorized the legislature to "enjoin”
people to go to church, and required the use of public funds to
maintain the churches, while allowing any "subject” to have his
own contribution paid to the denomination of his choice. While
it received a large majority of the popular vote, 8,885 to 6,225, it
was the one article which most clearly failed to obtain a two-
thirds majority, and the one which may have never been legally
ratified, though declared so by the convention. Those voting
against it expressed a desire to separate church and state. These,
in turn, included perhaps a few Baptists who favored such sep¬
aration on religious principle, a great many Protestants who feared
that the article might legalize Roman Catholicism, and an un¬
known number of people, one suspects, who were no longer very
regular in attending any church at all.
The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was adopted by a two-
thirds majority in a popular referendum from which no free
adult male was excluded. The vote was light, for opinion on the
matter seems not to have been excited. 19 It was six years since the
rebellion against King George, and four years since the British
army had left Massachusetts; doubtless many people wished to
be bothered no longer. The action of the people as constituent
power is, after all, a legal concept, or even a necessary legal fic¬
tion where the sovereignty of any concrete person or government
is denied. It does not signify that everyone is actually engrossed in
“About 23 per cent of adult males voted on ratification of the constitution
of 1780, a figure which may be compared with 30 per cent of adult males
voting on ratification of the French constitution of 1793, with the difference
that in the France of 1793 only those voting “yes” took the trouble to vote
at all (1,801,918 “ayes” to 11,610 “no’s” with some 4,300,000 abstentions).
It is a question whether a vote by 23 per cent of the population should be
considered “light.” This percentage may have been a good measure of the
politically interested population; in the annual elections of the governor
the ratio of persons actually casting a vote to the total of adult white males
ranged between 9 per cent and 28 per cent until it began to rise with the
election of 1800. See J. R. Pole, “Suffrage and Representation in Massachu¬
setts: A Statistical Note,” in William and Mary Quarterly , XTV (October,
1957), 590-592, and J. Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la
Revolution et VEmpire (Paris, 1951), 252.
354 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the fabrication of constitutions. On the other hand, it does not
seem necessary to believe that the convention, when it declared
the constitution ratified, put something over on an innocent or
apathetic or reluctant people. The people of Massachusetts had
rejected the constitution proposed in 1778. They could have re¬
jected the one proposed in 1780. It was adopted, not because it
was thought perfect or final by everyone, but because it offered
a frame of government, or basis of agreement, within which peo¬
ple could still lawfully disagree. It has lasted, with many amend¬
ments, until the present day.
A Word on the Constitution of the United States
The idea that sovereignty lay with the people, and not with
states or their governments, made possible in America a new kind
of federal structure unknown in Europe. The Dutch and Swiss
federations were unions of component parts, close permanent
alliances between disparate corporate members. For them no
other structure was possible, because there was as yet no Dutch
or Swiss people except in a cultural sense. It was in the Dutch
revolution of 1795 and the Swiss revolution of 1798 that these
two bundles of provinces or cantons were first proclaimed as po¬
litical nations. In America it was easier to make the transition
from a league of states, set up during the Revolution, to a more
integral union set up in the United States constitution of 1787.
The new idea was that, instead of the central government drawing
its powers from the states, both central and state governments
should draw their powers from the same source; the question was
the limit between these two sets of derived powers. The citizen,
contrariwise, was simultaneously a citizen both of the United States
and of his own state. He was the sovereign, not they. He chose to
live under two constitutions, two sets of laws, two sets of courts
and officials; theoretically, he had created them all, reserving to
himself, under each set, certain liberties specified in declarations of
rights.
It has been widely believed, since the publication in 1913 of
Charles A. Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,
that the federal constitution of 1787 marked a reaction against
democratic impulses of the Revolution, and was a device by which
men of property, particularly those holding securities of the state
or continental governments, sought to protect themselves and their
financial holdings against the dangers of popular rule. The Phila-
R. R. PALMER 355
delpMa convention has been represented as an almost clandestine
body, which exceeded its powers, and which managed (as has
also been said of the Massachusetts convention of 1780) to impose
a conservative constitution on a confused or apathetic people.
Recently the flimsiness of the evidence for this famous thesis has
been shown by Professor Robert Brown. 20 The thesis takes its
place in the history of historical writing, as a product of that
Progressive and post-Progressive era in which the common man
could be viewed as the dupe or plaything of private interests.
It seems likely enough that there was a conservative reaction
after the American Revolution, and even a movement among the
upper class (minus the old loyalists) not wholly unlike the "aristo¬
cratic resurgence” which I shall soon describe in the Europe of
the 1780’s. The difference is that these neo-aristocrats of America
were less obstinate and less caste-conscious than in Europe. They
did not agree with each other, and they knew they could not rule
alone. The men at Philadelphia in 1787 were too accomplished
as politicians to be motivated by anything so impractical as
ideology or mere self-interest. They hoped, while solving concrete
problems, to arouse as little opposition as possible. They lacked
also the European sense of the permanency of class status. Think¬
ing of an upper class as something that individuals might move
into or out of, they allowed for social mobility both upward and
downward. The wealthy Virginian, George Mason, at the Philadel¬
phia convention, on urging that the upper class should take care
to give adequate representation to the lower, offered it as one of
his reasons that, however affluent they might be now, "the course
of a few years not only might, but certainly would, distribute
their posterity through the lowest classes of society.” 21 No one
seems to have disputed this prognostication. Such acceptance of
future downward mobility for one’s own grandchildren, if by no
means universal in America, was far more common than in
Europe. Without such downward mobility there could not long
remain much room for newcomers at the top, or much assurance
of a fluid society. With it, there could not be a permanent aristoc¬
racy in the European sense.
It was the state legislatures that chose the delegates to the
“R. E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: a Critical Analysis of
“An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution 39 (Princeton, 1956). The
critique of Beard is carried even further in a more recent work, Forrest
McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution
(Chicago, 1958).
21 Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (New York, 1902-1910), III, 47.
35® REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Philadelphia convention, in answer to a widely expressed demand
for strengthening the federal government under the Articles of
Confederation. The Philadelphia convention proceeded, not to
amend the Articles, but to ignore and discard them. It repudiated
the union which the thirteen states had made. Beard in 1913 found
it satisfying to call this operation a revolution, a revolution from
above to be sure, which he compared to a coup d'etat of Napoleon.
His critic, Professor Brown, in 1956, found it satisfying and im¬
portant to deny any revolutionary action in what happened.
What did really happen? The men at Philadelphia did circum¬
vent the state governments, and in a sense they betrayed those
who sent them. They did so by adopting the revolutionary prin¬
ciple of the American Revolution, which had already become less
purely revolutionary and more institutionalized as an accepted
routine, as shown in the Massachusetts convention of 1780, which
had been followed by a New Hampshire convention, and new
constitution for New Hampshire in 1784. The Philadelphia con¬
vention went beyond the existing constituted bodies, that is, the
state governments and the Congress under the Articles, by ap¬
pealing for support directly to the people, who in each state
elected, for this purpose only, conventions to discuss, ratify, or
refuse to ratify the document proposed by the convention at Phil¬
adelphia. The authors of the proposed federal constitution needed
a principle of authority; they conceived that “the people were the
fountain of all power,” and that if popularly chosen conventions
ratified their work “all disputes and doubt concerning [its] legiti¬
macy” would be removed. 22 In each state, in voting for ratifying
conventions, the voters voted according to the franchise as given
by their state constitutions. No use was made of the more truly
revolutionary idea, still alive in Massachusetts in 1780, that on
the acceptance of a government every man should have a vote. In
some states the authorized voters were a great majority; in none
were they a small minority. The actual vote for the ratifying
conventions was light, despite protracted public discussion, be¬
cause most people lost interest, or never had any, in abstract
debates concerning governmental structure at the distant federal
level. Eleven states ratified within a few months, and the consti¬
tution went into effect for the people of those eleven states. The
remaining two states came in within three years. The whole pro¬
cedure was revolutionary in a sense, but revolution had already
become domesticated in America. The idea of the people as the
“Quoted by Brown, op. cit, 140.
R. R. PALMER 357
constituent power, acting through special conventions, was so
generally accepted and understood that a mere mention of the
word “convention,” in the final article of the proposed constitution,
was thought sufficient explanation of the process of popular en¬
dorsement.
Nevertheless, men of popular principles, those who would soon
be called democrats, and who preferred the arrangements of the
Pennsylvania constitution, with its single-house legislature to
which the executive was subordinated, found much in the new
federal constitution not to their liking, at least at first sight. The
new instrument reproduced the main features of the Massachu¬
setts constitution of 1780: the strong president, the senate, the
house of representatives, the partial executive veto, the independ¬
ent judiciary, the separation and balance of powers. In fact, the
longer tenure of offices—four years for the president, six for
senators, two for representatives, in place of the annual terms for
corresponding functionaries in Massachusetts—shows a reaction
away from revolutionary democracy and toward the giving of
more adequate authority to those entrusted with public power.
The president was not popularly elected, like the governor in
Massachusetts; but neither was he designated by the legislative as¬
sembly, like the president in Pennsylvania and governors in the
Southern states. He was elected by an electoral college, with each
state free to determine how its own share of these electors should
be chosen. Although as early as 1788 almost half the states pro¬
vided for popular election of presidential electors, it was not until
1828 that this became the general and permanent rule. In the
federal constitution the unique feature, and key to the main com¬
promise, was the senate. Not only did large and small states have
the same number of senators, but it was the state legislatures that
chose them. Since it was the state legislatures that conservative
or hard-money men mainly feared in the 1780’s, this provision
can hardly have been introduced in the hope of assuring economic
conservatism. It was introduced to mollify the states as states. In
the senate the new union was a league of preexisting corporate
entities. In the house of representatives it rested more directly on
the people. Anyone who had the right to vote in his state could
vote for a member of the lower house of Congress. In one respect
the federal constitution, by its silence, was more democratic in a
modem sense than any of the state constitutions. No pecuniary
or religious qualification was specified for any office.
The new constitution was a compromise, but that it produced
a less popular federal government, less close to the people, than
35& REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that of the Articles of Confederation, seems actually contrary to
the facts. It created a national arena for political controversy.
There were now, for the first time, national elections in which
voters could dispute over national issues. One result was the rise,
on a national scale, of the Jeffersonian democratic movement in
the 1790's.
Ambivalence of the American Revolution
In conclusion, the American Revolution was really a revolution,
in that certain Americans subverted their legitimate government,
ousted the contrary-minded and confiscated their property, and
set the example of a revolutionary program, through mechanisms
by which the people was deemed to act as the constituent power.
This much being said, it must be admitted that the Americans,
when they constituted their new states, tended to reconstitute
much of what they already had. They were as fortunate and satis-
fied a people as any the world has known. They thus offered both
the best and the worst example, the most successful and the least
pertinent precedent, for less fortunate or more dissatisfied peoples
who in other parts of the world might hope to realize the same
principles.
Pennsylvania and Georgia gave themselves one-chamber legisla-
tures, but both had had one-chamber legislatures before the Revo¬
lution. All states set up weak governors; they had been under-
mining the authority of royal governors for generations. South
Carolina remained a planter oligarchy before and after inde¬
pendence, but even in South Carolina fifty-acre freeholders had a
vote. New York set up one of the most conservative of the state
constitutions, but this was the first constitution under which Jews
received equality of civil rights—not a very revolutionary de¬
parture, since Jews had been prospering in New York since 1654. 23
The Anglican Church was disestablished, but it had had few roots
in the colonies anyway. In New England the sects obtained a little
more recognition, but Congregationalism remained favored by law.
The American revolutionaries made no change in the laws of
indentured servitude. They deplored, but avoided, the matter of
Negro slavery. Quitrents were generally abolished, but they had
been nominal anyway, and a kind of manorial system remained
long after the Revolution in New York. Laws favoring primogeni-
^J. R. Marcus, Early American Jewry (Philadelphia, 1953), II, 530.
R. R. PALMER 359
ture and entail were done away with, but apparently they had
been little used by landowners in any case. No general or statistical
estimate is yet possible on the disposition of loyalist property.
Some of the confiscated estates went to strengthen a new prop¬
ertied class, some passed through the hands of speculators, and
some either immediately or eventually came into the possession
of small owners. There was enough change of ownership to create
a material interest in the Revolution, but obviously no such up¬
heaval in property relations as in France after 1789.
Even the apparently simple question of how many people re¬
ceived the right to vote because of the Revolution cannot be satis¬
factorily answered. There was some extension of democracy in
this sense, but the more we examine colonial voting practices the
smaller the change appears. The Virginia constitution of 1776
simply gave the vote to those "at present” qualified. By one esti¬
mate the number of persons voting in Virginia actually declined
from 1741 to 1843, and those casting a vote in the 1780’s were
about a quarter of the free male population over twenty-one years
of age. 24 The advance of political democracy, at the time of the
Revolution, was most evident in the range of officers for whom
voters could vote. In the South the voters generally voted only for
members of the state legislatures; in Pennsylvania and New
England they voted also for local officials, and in New England
for governors as well.
In 1796, at the time of the revolution in Europe, and when the
movement of Jeffersonian democracy was gathering strength in
America, seven of the sixteen states then in the union had no
property qualification for voters in the choice of the lower legis¬
lative house, and half of them provided for popular election of
governors, only the seaboard South, and New Jersey, persisting in
legislative designation of the executive. 25 The best European his¬
torians underestimate the extent of political democracy in Amer¬
ica at this time. They stress the restrictions on voting rights in
America, as in the French constitution of 1791. 26 They do so
because they have read the best American historians on the sub-
U C. S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political practices in Washington’s
Virginia (Williamsburg, 1952), 138—139, 143.
3S W. L. Smith, A Comparative View of the Several States with Each Other
. . . (Philadelphia, 1796). There are six tables showing comparisons.
“See, for example, G. Lefebvre, La Revolution frangaise (Paris, 1951),
99, and Coming of the French Revolution , Eng. trans. (Princeton, 1947),
180-181; P. Sagnac, La fin de I’ancien regime et la Revolution americaine
1763—1789 (Paris, 1947), 386-393, where the Beard view of issues involved
in the writing and ratification of the federal constitution is clearly ex¬
pounded.
360 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ject and have in particular followed the school of Charles Beard
and others. The truth seems to be that America was a good deal
more democratic than Europe in the 1790's. It had been so, within
limits, long before the revolutionary era began.
Nor in broad political philosophy did the American Revolution
require a violent break with customary ideas. For Englishmen it
was impossible to maintain, in the eighteenth century or after,
that the British constitution placed any limits on the powers of
Parliament. Not so for Americans; they constantly appealed, to
block the authority of Parliament or other agencies of the British
government, to their rights as Englishmen under the British con¬
stitution. The idea of limited government, the habit of thinking in
terms of two levels of law, of an ordinary law checked by a higher
constitutional law, thus came out of the realities of colonial ex¬
perience. The colonial Americans believed also, like Blackstone
for that matter, that the rights of Englishmen were somehow the
rights of all mankind. When the highest English authorities dis¬
agreed on what Americans claimed as English rights, and when
the Americans ceased to be English by abjuring their King, they
were obliged to find another and less ethnocentric or merely
historical principle of justification. They now called their rights the
rights of man. Apart from abstract assertions of natural liberty
and equality, which were not so much new and alarming as con¬
ceptual statements as in the use to which they were applied, the
rights claimed by Americans were the old rights of Englishmen—
trial by jury, habeas corpus, freedom of the press, freedom of
religion, freedom of elections, no taxation without representation.
The content of rights was broadened, but the content changed less
than the form, for the form now became universal. 27 Rights
were demanded for human beings as such. It was not necessary to
be English, or even American, to have an ethical claim to them.
The form also became more concrete, less speculative and meta¬
physical, more positive and merely legal. Natural rights were
numbered, listed, written down, and embodied in or annexed to
constitutions, in the foundations of the state itself.
So the American Revolution remains ambivalent. If it was con¬
servative, it was also revolutionary, and vice versa. It was con¬
servative because colonial Americans had long been radical by
general standards of Western Civilization. It was, or appeared,
conservative because the deepest conservatives, those most at-
^For a European view, see O. Vossler, “Studien zur Erklarung der Men-
schenrechte,” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 142 (1930), 536-539.
R. R. PALMER 361
tached to King and empire, conveniently left the scene. It was
conservative because the colonies had never known oppression,
excepting always for slavery—because, as human institutions go,
America had always been free. It was revolutionary because the
colonists took the risk of rebellion, because they could not avoid
a conflict among themselves, and because they checkmated those
Americans who, as the country developed, most admired the aristo¬
cratic society of England and Europe. Henceforth the United
States, in Louis Hartz’s phrase, would be the land of the frustrated
aristocrat, not of the frustrated democrat; for to be an aristocrat it
is not enough to think of oneself as such, it is necessary to be
thought so by others; and never again would deference for social
rank be a characteristic American attitude. Elites, for better or for
worse, would henceforth be on the defensive against popular
values. Moreover the Americans in the 1770’s, not content merely
to throw off an outside authority, insisted on transmuting the
theory of their political institutions. Their revolution was revolu¬
tionary because it showed how certain abstract doctrines, such as
the rights of man and the sovereignty of the people, could be
"reduced to practice,” as Adams put it, by assemblages of fairly
levelheaded gentlemen exercising constituent power in the name
of the people. And, quite apart from its more distant repercus¬
sions, it was certainly revolutionary in its impact on the con¬
temporary world across the Atlantic.
BETWEEN
FEAR
AND HOPE
THE FORCES IN CONTENTION
After the American victory in the War for Independ¬
ence the major political question facing the American
nation was whether the Articles of Confederation pro¬
vided a strong enough central government to enable the
young republic to fulfill its potentialities, to achieve, in
the view of the advocates of change, the promises of the
Revolution. The forces of contention in the struggle over
this question are described in the following two selec¬
tions. The first piece emphasizes the material interests
and concrete forces that distinguished the proponents of
a stronger central government from their antagonists,
while the second stresses the differences in age, experi¬
ence, psychology, and aspirations that divided the two
groups.
forrest mcdonald (b. 1927) is a member of the
Department of History at Wayne State University;
Stanley elkins (b. 1925) is a member of the Depart¬
ment of History at Smith College; and eric mckitrick
(b. 1919) of the Department of History at Columbia
University.
364
FORREST MCDONALD
365
The Anti-Federalists 3
1781-1789
FORREST MCDONALD
The term anti-Federalists 1 means those persons who opposed
the establishment of a national government under the Consti¬
tution. Anti-Federalists did not use the term to designate them¬
selves; it was coined by Federalists as a term of opprobrium, and
was used much as one might today denounce a conservative by
calling him a reactionary or a fascist, or denounce a liberal as a
radical left-winger or communist. Because the label stuck, how¬
ever, it can be used here as a convenient term for purposes of
communication, without conveying disapproval, at least not in
the sense in which it originally conveyed disapproval.
Indeed, the most important point to be made about the anti-
Federalists is that they were not, as they were sometimes depicted
by the Federalists, uniformly unintelligent, uninformed, and un¬
principled; and neither were they the downtrodden masses, the
Reprinted with permission from The Wisconsin Magazine of History , XLVI,
3 (Spring, 1963), 206-214.
Author’s Note: This paper, in slightly different form, was delivered as an
address before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association
in New York, December 28, 1960. It is published here without any preten¬
sions that it is definitive; rather, it is a condensed forecast of one of the
major portions of a forthcoming book on the establishment of the American
governmental system, 1781-1792. Nor are the factual data or the docu¬
mentation represented as adequate to "prove” the thesis; rather, the factual
data are only illustrative, and the footnotes only document the illustrative
matter. Finally, I am familiar with the several books relating to the subject
—including one, Jackson T. Main’s The Antifederalists (Chapel Hill, 1961),
which has the same main title as this paper—that have been published
since the delivery of my address; and am aware that this paper, and the
forthcoming book that underlies it, disagree with those works in almost
every salient.
Spellings of the term vary. Mr. Main, cited above, uses a single, unhy¬
phenated word with a capital "A”: Antifederalists. This and "Antifoedera-
lists” were as commonly used by Federalist writers as were "Anti-federalists”
and "anti-Federalists” and their variants with the "oe” character. Historians
have used all these spellings. The single capitalized word. Antifederalists,
suggest that the wearers of the term had something positive in common
that would justify thinking of them as a group—in general, cohesiveness,
organization, self-consciousness, and some existence pre-dating the contest
over the Constitution. The term anti-Federalists has a different connotation:
it only designates those persons who, on the single issue of the ratification
of the Constitution, opposed the persons calling themselves Federalists. It
is thus the more neutral term and, in my judgment, the preferable term.
366 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
exploited fanners, or the debtor class; nor yet the “agrarian-
minded,” the old Whigs, or the radicals, as they have been de¬
picted by various twentieth-century historians. Their leadership
matched that of the Federalists for intelligence, education, experi¬
ence, and political savoir faire, and they comprehended a similar
assortment of rich men, poor men, virtuous men, and thieves. In
short, they can not be ordered with any rigid or simple system of
classification.
Answering the question, Who were the anti-Federalists and how
did they come to be that way? involves answering, in large meas¬
ure, the same question about their opposite number, the Federal¬
ists, and neither is an easy undertaking. A suitable point of
departure, I think, is a comment made by Edmund Morgan: “The
most radical change produced in Americans by the Revolution
was in fact not a division at all”—for they began divided—'hut
the union of three million cantankerous colonists into a new
nation.” 2 It is explaining why so many people espoused more
perfect union through the Constitution, and not why so many
people opposed it, that is the difficult task.
This point will be illustrated, and the first basis of division
established, by recalling certain facts of life, as life was lived
in the eighteenth century, that are so obvious as to be almost
invisible. Given the existing technology of communication and
transportation—which dictated that these functions be synony¬
mous, and that travel by water was far easier and faster than
travel by land—it took about the same amount of time to move
men, goods, money, or ideas and information from Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, to Liverpool as it did to move them to, say,
Augusta, Georgia. Similarly, in point of time Philadelphia—
possibly the second largest English-speaking city in the world—
was little further from London, the largest, than it was from
Pittsburgh, and it was closer to London than was Vienna. Norfolk
was closer to the Azores than to the furthermost Virginia town;
Charleston was closer to any island in the British West Indies
than it was to Raleigh.
It was thus far more natural for most Americans to think in
local terms than in national terms, and, when they thought about
it at all, to prefer local authority to national authority. If distance
made unreasonable the notion that the thirteen colonies could be
well governed from London, distance made almost equally far-
S. Morgan, T he Birth of the Republic , 1763-1789 (Chicago,
FORREST MCDONALD 367
fetched the notion that the thirteen states could be well governed
by a single national government. In short, for most people the
natural thing to be was an anti-Federalist, and it took something
special to make them think otherwise. Too, simply by virtue of
living in one place instead of another, Americans were less or
more prone to think nationally: to be aware of the existence of
national problems, and to think of themselves as Americans before
thinking of themselves as citizens of their states or towns. An
inhabitant of, say, Jaflxey, New Hampshire, would normally not
have direct contact with the government of the United States
from one year to the next, would deal with his state government
only through the annual visit of the tax collector, and would come
into direct contact with information, ideas, or people from the
outside world only two or three times a year. On the other hand,
in the normal course of events an inhabitant of Philadelphia
would, irrespective of his occupation, wealth, education, or station
in life, come into daily contact with persons and news and ideas
from the other states and, indeed, from Europe as well. 3
These were the first and most important factors predisposing
Americans towards national or provincial loyalties during the
postwar decade, and towards corresponding loyalties during the
contest over ratification—and their preponderating weight was
on the side of localism. Several other sets of predisposing factors
worked the other way: particularly, the wartime experience of
some people, the peacetime experience of others, and the eco¬
nomic interests of still others.
Among those who became devoted to the national cause as a
result of the war, three groups are most important. First, those
who learned at first-hand the idiocy of attempting to wage a war
without a government, which would include particularly members
of Congress and important administrative officials who served
between 1778 and 1782. 4 Second, those who fought in the war,
particularly those in the continental line and most particularly
®Said Alexander Hamilton: “Man is very much a creature of habit. A
thing that rarely strikes his senses will generally have but little influence
upon his mind. A government continually at a distance and out of sight,
can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of the people/' The Fed¬
eralist (Modem Library Edition, 1941), 168.
4 This generalization, like all generalizations made here, is only partially
valid; an effort will be made later to account for the exceptions. The striking
exception to the generalization about Congress is the members of the so-
called Lee-Adams Junto—delegates from Virginia and Massachusetts and
certain of their allies, especially in New England—who were in Congress
for part of the years cited, and some of whom later opposed the Consti¬
tution.
368 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
those officers who served close to Washington. Third, those who
inhabited areas which suffered great devastation or long occupa¬
tion at the hands of the British during the war.
The peacetime experience (1783-1787) likewise convinced
some that a national government was necessary, but its effect was
upon whole populations of whole states—that is, on those states
in which the experiments in independence convinced most people
that their states could not make a go of it alone. Making a go of
it appeared impossible for a variety of reasons: in Connecticut
because of a hopelessly ensnarled fiscal system that blocked the
successful working of both government and economy; in Maryland
because of a political movement that portended great social up¬
heaval; in Georgia because of an Indian uprising that threatened
the very survival of the inhabitants; and so on. 5
As to the role of economic interests, I have previously devoted
435 pages of a book to an effort to delineate how these worked in
winning friends for the Constitution, and apart from repeating
that they were complex, subtle, and variable, I shall not reiterate
the effort here. 6 But I shall return to economic interests that
worked for anti-Federalism in a moment.
Now, if one applies to the contest over ratification the several
considerations just mentioned, one comes up with a remarkable
picture of it. I invite you to try it. Begin with an outline map of
the United States, vintage 1787, with counties and towns indicated.
Then color in red (for Federalist) all places which had regular
intercourse with other states, and color the remainder blue (for
anti-Federalist). Then erase and change from blue to red all areas
which were occupied by British armies for more than a year, or
in which the ascertainable destruction from warfare exceeded, say.
6 T3iese generalizations are drawn largely from manuscript volumes 2,
Industry,” and 5, “Finance and Currency,” in the Connecticut Archives,
Hartford; Hartford Connecticut C our ant. New London Connecticut Gazette,
Middletown Middlesex Gazette, and New Haven Connecticut Journal , 1785-
1787, passim; Records of the Loan of 1790, especially volumes 174A, 491,
495, and 498, and the New Haven Port Records, all manuscripts in the
Fiscal Section of the National Archives; Philip A. Crowl, “Anti-Federalism
in Maryland, 1787—1788,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, IV (Octo¬
ber, 1947), 446—469 and the same author’s Maryland during and after
™ e Revolution (Baltimore, 1943); Baltimore Maryland Journal ; Annapolis
Maryland Gazette, 1785-1787, passim; Savannah Gazette of the State of
Georgia, July-December, 1787; Journal of the Assembly of the State of
Georgia, September Session, 1787, manuscript in the Georgia Department
of Archives and History, Atlanta; and Kenneth Coleman, The American
Revolution in Georgia, 1763-1789 (Athens, Ga., 1958).
6 Forrest McDonald, We The People: The Economic Origins of the Con¬
stitution (Chicago, 1958).
FORREST MCDONALD 369
25 percent of the total value of property other than land. Then
repeat the operation for places which furnished members of Con¬
gress between 1778 and 1782, and men who served in the con¬
tinental line with the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher; and do
so again for places in which the place itself or three of its half-
dozen richest inhabitants stood to profit directly by the adoption
of the Constitution. Finally, repeat the operation for the entirety
of the five states which, given the objective conditions prevailing
under the Articles of Confederation, considered themselves the
weakest: Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and
Georgia. The map you end up with will, at a glance, seem scarcely
distinguishable from Orin G. Libby’s maps showing the geographi¬
cal distribution of the vote on the ratification of the Constitution. 7
But only at a glance. Closer inspection will reveal discrepancies,
e.g., that thirteen of the fourteen delegates from counties in the
Trans-Alleghany region of Virginia, which you have as blue (anti-
Federalist) actually voted for ratification; or that the Connecticut
Valley and Cape Cod come out as checkerboards, whereas you
have them definitely one way or the other. In all, perhaps a fourth
or a fifth of the votes axe as yet unaccounted for.
And that is as far as a general analysis of the contest can go.
For the remainder of the analysis, one must look to individuals
and to vested interests in local politics. When the microscope is
thus applied, the leaders of anti-Federalism, as well as the most
important dynamic elements in their opposition to the Constitu¬
tion, stand revealed.
Individuals first. For one kind of person, at least, it was possible
to be well educated, well informed, disinterested, and genuinely
concerned over the national welfare, and yet opposed to ratifica¬
tion. This was the ideologue, the doctrinaire republican in the
classical sense, who could oppose the Constitution on the grounds
that it contained many imperfections from the point of view of
republican principles of political theory. Now, what makes a man
a doctrinaire—republican or any other kind—I can not say, but
who these men were and what they believed and how they be¬
haved is easily enough pointed out. In the Constitutional Conven¬
tion, they were Elbridge Gerry, Edmund Randolph, John Francis
Mercer, George Mason, and perhaps others; in the country at
large, they were such prominent anti-Federalists as Joshua Ather¬
ton of New Hampshire, Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina,
7 Orin Grant Libby, Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen
States on the Ratification of the Federal Constitution , 1787—1788 (Madison,
1894).
370 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
George Bryan of Pennsylvania, Timothy Bloodworth of North
Carolina, and a host of Virginians. They were men in the ration¬
alist tradition, men who reasoned from principles to particulars,
men whose views were the precise opposite of that so well ex¬
pressed by John Dickinson in the Constitutional Convention: “Ex¬
perience,” said Dickinson, “must be our only guide. Reason may
mislead us.” 8 Such men viewed Harrington, Locke, and Montes¬
quieu much as a fundamentalist views the Holy Bible; to them,
political salvation lay in the difficult but possible task of devising
a perfect system. Inasmuch as reason would show that any im¬
perfect form (whether democratic, aristocratic, or monarchist^)
would inevitably degenerate into tyranny, it was better to make
do without a national government than to create an imperfect one. 9
With the ideologues the Federalists could argue, through the
facile pens and dexterous wits of such skilled theoreticians as
Hamilton, Madison, Wilson, Coxe, and Webster. Vested interest
groups were another matter, and Federalists could cope with them
only by hurling derisive epithets—“pretended patriots,” “ambitious
and interested men,” “artful and designing men,” “anti-Federalists”
or by attempting to offer contrary interests. A part of the opposi-
tion to the Constitution by vested interest groups has long since
been recognized: in the very first number of The Federalist , Ham¬
ilton predicted that “men in every State” would “resist all changes
which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument and
consequence of the offices they hold under the State-establish¬
ments ; and in 1924 Allan Nevins made it clear that holders of
important state offices generally were, in fact, anti-Federalists. But
we are dealing here with a much larger field. Lucrative and
prestigious state offices were few, and men with vested interests
in state primacy were legion. 10
It is impossible to delineate all such vested-interest groups here,
Madison’s Journal, August 13, 1787, in Charles C. Tansill, ed., Documents
Illustrative of the Formation of the Union (Washington, 1927), 533.
9 For an elaboration and further development of these comments on the
doctrinaire republican mentality, see the introduction to Forrest McDonald,
ed.. Empire and Nation: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania hy John
Dickinson and Letters from the Federal Farmer by Richard Henry Lee (New
York, 1962). For a clear example of how it worked, see Lee's Letters in
Uiat volume. A lengthy analysis of it, tentatively titled “The Anti-Federalist
P j L ?1 rS ’ is ^ e sub l ect of a forthcoming book by Professor Morton Borden
of Montana State University (a preview of which was given in a provocative
paper delivered by Professor Borden at the Mississippi Valley Historical
Association meeting in Milwaukee, April, 1962).
10 The Federalist (Modem Library Edition, 1941), 4; Allan Nevins, The
American States during and after the Revolution (New York, 1924).
FORREST MCDONALD 37I
but it is possible to draw lines around enough of them to afford
abundant illustration of the point. New York offers a prime ex¬
ample. Governor George Clinton, aspiring to make his the Em¬
pire State and to establish a dynasty to rule it, had the good sense
to realize that doing so involved the use of political power both to
govern well and to buy the loyalties of people through their am¬
bition or avarice. 11
This was not a simple task, and should not be regarded as such.
That is, most modem devices which we associate with the welding
of political organizations were not available to Clinton. The func¬
tions of government were yet too limited to permit building power
through patronage; public works were too few to permit building
power through graft in the construction business; and so on. One
will search in vain for evidence of modem manifestations of
machine politics.
But one can hold to this maxim: wherein lies the profit in
dealing with government, there also lies the greatest source of
power. In New York, as in most states, profit in dealing with gov¬
ernment lay in public lands and the public debt. Salable public
lands in New York consisted primarily of confiscated loyalist
estates, the total market value of which was some £750,000 New
York current, or almost $2,000,000. The unimaginative stirrer of
these ingredients might have been disposed simply to sell the
estates, pay the debts, and be done with it. Not so with Clinton;
no dullard was he. On the theory that one wins friends among the
well-to-do by making them better-to-do, he arranged, through a
series of acts and administrative decisions, that the confiscated
estates be disposed of according to a careful design. So as to insure
that the field of buyers would not be cluttered with small pur¬
chasers, the lands were sold in large blocs at public auction. So as
to insure profits to all speculators, it was provided in 1780 that
purchases could be made on the installment plan and in certain
kinds of public securities, at par. Since these securities had not
yet been provided for, they could be bought on the open market
at prices which returned handsome profits to purchasers of con¬
fiscated estates. In effect, such operators were enabled to buy on
“There is only one full-length biography of Clinton, E. Wilder Spaulding’s
His Excellency George Clinton, Critic of the Constitution (New York,
1938); the same author’s New York in the Critical Period (New York, 1932)
is also useful. See also the Public Papers of George Clinton (New York
Albany, 1900), and Hamilton’s comments about Clinton and his supporters
in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds.. The Papers of Alexander
Hamilton, vols. 2 and 3 (New York, 1962).
37^ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the market at prices ranging from three shillings nine pence to
four shillings on the pound, and sell to the state (for confiscated
estates) at twenty s hillin gs - 12
The speculative orgy thus engendered lasted from the latter
part of the war to 1786, until a number of rich people had become
political friends and a larger number of political friends had be¬
come rich people. Then it was time for the next step. It was time
to do justice to the suffering public creditors. But not quite all of
them. Clinton's chief financial advisor, state treasurer Gerard
Bancker, first reckoned how much debt could be supported with
the income from the state's lucrative import duties, and then
combed the lists of security holders and came up with tables of
the various combinations of securities in which a minimum ex¬
penditure could result in largesse for a maximum number of
voters. In what was offered to the public as a generous, respon-
sible, and patriotic action, the Clintonians decided to fund not
only all the state debts but about $1,400,000 of continental debts
as well. Two forms of continental debts were assumed: Loan
Office Certificates and so-called Barber's Notes, certificates issued
by the United States for supplies furnished the continental army.
Some 5,000 holders of continental securities—about half the num¬
ber of voters in a normal election—were provided for under this
act. As the system was devised, these securities were neither paid
off nor funded; they were simply lent to the state, and the state
punctually paid interest on them. Note that the system created, in
effect, a list of 5,000 pensioners. Note also that the action could
hardly have been inspired by either patriotism or responsibility,
for $3,600,000 in other kinds of continental debts held in the
state, which were politically less potent because they were con¬
centrated in the hands of only a couple of hundred persons, re¬
mained unfunded. This scheme was, as one critic charged, “a
studied design to divide the interests of the public creditors.” 13
But it was even more than that. It was also a method for doubly
rewarding the faithful and punishing those who had been so
an excellent description of speculation in confiscated estates in
New Y ° rk see Hairy B. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the
vaiVT 1 °f, the State °f New York (New York, 1939), 59-60, 63-
78, 114-115, and elsewhere. Prices of public securities have been taken
from occasional notices in New York newspapers.
“laws of die State of New York Passed at the Sessions of the Legislature
(3 vols., Albany 1886-1888), 2:253ff.; Report of the Committee on the
Treasury to the House of Assembly, January 16, 1788, published in the
p!ZJ°£ 31 ’ 1788; “Gustavus,” in the New York
Packet of April 13, 1786; and Records of the Loan of 1790, vols. 22, 545,
548, 549, 551, m the National Archives.
FORREST MCDONALD 373
wicked as to fail to appreciate past favors. The rise in security
prices which quickly followed the funding act caught the specu¬
lators in confiscated estates as bears in a bull market. That is,
they were in effect short sellers, whose profits depended upon keep¬
ing the security market low; they were heavily extended for install¬
ment delivery of securities against purchases of confiscated estates.
When the securities market rose, they found themselves having
to pay roughly 300 per cent as much as they had expected to pay
for the securities with which to make their payments. Not sur¬
prisingly, many of them were broken.
Those who had appreciated Clinton’s generosity, however, those
who had given him unreserved political support, were protected.
They were informed in advance (1) that the funding would take
place, (2) the precise securities which would be funded, and (3)
when the operations would occur. Accordingly, they were able to
cover their positions and even make a tidy sum by going long in
appropriate securities. 14
These were merely among the more spectacular of Clinton’s de¬
vices. There were others, and they all worked. Small wonder, then,
that when the Constitution came along and threatened to under¬
mine Clinton by transferring control of the more lucrative devices
from the state to a general government, as well as similarly trans¬
ferring that great source of revenue, the tariff, Clinton greeted the
document with less than enthusiasm. Small wonder, too, that
when he vigorously opposed ratification, the people of the state
voted against it, 14,000 to 6,500. 15
Before proceeding with an effort to outline the development of
major vested-interested groups in other states, it is well to pause
and observe that by no means all vested interests created during
the period were economic interests. Greed may have been the
quickest motive to which politicians could appeal, but lust for
prestige and power drove most of the managers themselves and,
when properly utilized, could provide a continuing basis of strength
among the followers. This is clearly seen in a contrasting view
of Clinton himself and of the two Clintonian delegates to the
4 * YV^ e two fore g° m g paragraphs are inferences drawn
from the sources cited in notes 12 , 13, and 14, and from the Votes and
Proceedings of the Assembly of the State of New York , 1786-1787 and
New York newspapers for the same period. ’
“A summary of election returns for five counties appears in the New
W 14“l7fiS 0 f J “2f 5 ’ 17 ^ 8; for ° range Co »“ty. see the Daily Advertiser,
W 7 ’iTOa 8i / e Q fr S County (incorrectly called Suffolk therein), ibid.,
3 1788 ^ tC + h t. SS County, the Poughkeepsie Country Journal, June
rf, 1788, and for Westchester County, the Daily Advertiser, June 3 , 1788
The popular votes in two counties, Washington and Suffolk, are unknown.
374 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Philadelphia Convention, John Lansing and Robert Yates. Clinton
was clearly driven by desire for power, and it does not alter the
case that he exercised his power judiciously and, for the most
part, in the interest of the state. Lansing, on the other hand, liked
money. He was a rich man when he began his association with
Clinton, and because he capitalized on the opportunities his party
afforded, he became a much richer man. He also became a per¬
petually loyal party adherent. Yates, on the contrary, was incor¬
ruptible—at least, he was not corruptible by the love of money.
His biographer, writing soon after his death, gives us a moving
picture: “He was often urged to unite with some of his friends
in speculating in forfeited estates during the war, by which he
might easily have enriched himself and his connections without
censure or suspicion—and although such speculations were com¬
mon, yet he would not consent to become wealthy upon the ruin
of others.” (The biographer adds a touching footnote: “Chief
Justice Yates died poor.”) 16
Nor was Yates particularly ambitious for power. But where
avarice and ambition were absent, vanity was abundantly and
fatally present. Yates was induced to become a loyal Clintonian
by the simple expedient of giving him an extremely prestigious
position, albeit one which was neither particularly powerful nor
remunerative, that of chief justice of the state supreme court. In¬
terestingly, New York Federalists won him away from Clinton in
1789 by offering him their support for governor in a campaign
against Clinton himself. 17
It should be noted that in regard to non-economic vested in¬
terests the weight of advantages favored the anti-Federalists, but
in individual instances of particular strategic importance, the Fed¬
eralists were invariably in a position to gain. Two well-known
examples illustrate this matter. Massachusetts Federalists won the
indispensible support of Governor John Hancock by promising him
the vice-presidency, a promise they subsequently felt no obliga¬
tion to fulfill; and Virginia Federalists won the indispensible sup¬
port of Governor Edmund Randolph by promising him the at¬
torney-generalship, which he was actually awarded. 18
. Lansing, see the sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography;
Spauldings New Yorh in the Critical Period , 237; and scattered references
111 v . ^ Syrett and Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton,
especially III: 139—140. On Yates, see the sketch in the Dictionary of Ameri¬
can Biography and the biography appended to Senate Document 728, 60th
Congress, 2d Session, p. 205.
17 Ibid.; see also the several New York newspapers, April-June, 1789.
“Moncure D. Conway, Omitted Chapters in History Disclosed in the Life
and Papers of Edmund Randolph (New York, 1888), 385ff.; Rufus King to
Henry Knox, February 1, 1788, in Charles R. Ring, Life and Correspondence
FORREST MCDONALD 375
Now let us return to a survey of the development of vested in¬
terests in the states of the Confederation. The most fruitful soil
for such development existed when a policy designed for the over-
all, best interests of the state as a whole could be combined with
policies that worked to the particular advantage of particular
individuals. Such was the case with New York, and in this respect
the history of Virginia during the period strikingly resembles that
of New York, though it was different in every detail. The tangle
of interests in Virginia—state, regional, local, and personal—was
so involved that any attempt to discuss them in full here would be
folly. Let us, then, take notice of such matters as confiscated
estates, western lands, navigation of the Mississippi, and the nebu¬
lous but vital questions of personal prides and prestiges, but pass
over them and focus on but a single aspect of the problem, Vir¬
ginia’s commercial policy. 19
Virginia had, at least in considerable measure, been moved to
join the revolutionary movement as a means of dissolving the
credit bands which had bound planters to British and Scotch
merchants. The sequestration acts by which prewar private indebt¬
edness, amounting to some £2,000,000, was wiped out are well
known. As Isaac Harrell has so well shown, hordes of planters
seized the opportunity to pay nominal sums into the state treasury
and thereby legally expunge their debts to foreign merchants. 20
What is less known is that Virginia’s postwar commercial policy,
whose principal architects were Patrick Henry and the Lees, was
carefully designed to preserve the economic independence so un¬
scrupulously won.
To oversimplify considerably, that program was as follows. In
the view of the framers of the program, merchants had been able
to enshackle Virginia planters before the war only because they
operated in an artificially created oligopolistic (or semi-monopo¬
listic) marketing system. To prevent the reforging of the chains,
all that was necessary was to create, artificially, a system of ex¬
cessive competition. The method chosen was to develop a Virginia
mercantile class to conduct about a third of the tobacco business,
and to underwrite it with a system of bounties, drawbacks, and
of Rufus King (6 vols., New York, 1894-1900), 1:319; and Samuel B.
Harding, The Contest ewer the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in
the State of Massachusetts (New York, 1896), 85-87.
^here is no published general history of Virginia during the period;
useful secondary sources include the several biographies of Washington,
Henry, Madison, and Jefferson; Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in
the American Revolution , 1763-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942); and W. A. Low,
"Merchant and Planter Relations in Post-Revolutionary Virginia, 1783-1789,”
in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography , LXI (1953) 308-318.
*°Isaac S. Harrell, Loyalism in Virginia (Philadelphia, 1926).
376 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
so on, that enabled it to operate far more cheaply than foreigners.
This and many nicer refinements of the state’s commercial policy
produced intense competition between British, Scotch, French, and
other American carriers and merchants for a share of the business,
for there was not enough business to go around. As a result, in
the 1780’s, relative to the prewar years, credit was easy, money
was abundant, freight rates were low, and tobacco prices, despite
Robert Morris’ efforts to drive them down so as to fill his contract
with the French Farmers’ General, were high. 21 In short, because
of its political independence, Virginia had been able to liberate a
vast number of its inhabitants from the clutches of their foreign
creditors, and bring about a prosperity rarely matched in the
preceding century. 22
The ensuing vested interests in Virginia’s continued sovereignty
are thus obvious. Equally obvious is the fact that the Constitution
ran directly counter to these interests in every way. Again, the
intense opposition to ratification on the part of state leaders, and
the near-success of their efforts, are hardly surprising. 23
While public policy in these states worked to the advantage of
the states as well as to that of rapacious individuals, it was not so
in all places. In Massachusetts, for example, public creditors loaded
an insupportable burden upon the taxpayers when they succeeded
in having all their public paper funded at par in 1784. Private ad¬
vantage here was contrary to public advantage, and the result was
first the weakening of a state whose economy had already been
totally disrupted, then in increasing popular discontent, and finally
a brief civil war. 24 In Pennsylvania the most important public ac¬
tions that enriched special groups had a neutral effect upon the
welfare of the whole, and consequently won only such friends of
state sovereignty as could profit directly from it. In 1785, for ex-
The Farmers General was an organization of French financiers, to whom
collection of many indirect taxes had been farmed out, and who had been
granted a monopoly on the importation of tobacco.
2a The development of the program can be traced in the Journal of the
Howse of Delegates of the State of Virginia (Richmond, 1828.) and in the
published statutes. Its operations have been studied in the manuscript Naval
Officer Returns in the Virginia State Library, Richmond, and in the quota-
ions of prices and freight rates in the Alexandria Virginia Journal, Rich¬
mond Independent Chronicle, Richmond Weekly Advertiser, Richmond
American Advertiser, Fredericksburg Advertiser, Philadelphia Evening Her¬
ald, and New York Daily Advertiser .
rr / 3T J e 7 0te of *ke Virginia convention was 89 to 79 in favor of ratification.
The test account of the struggle in the convention is Hugh Blair Grigsby's
l tie History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, edited bv R A
Brock (2 vols., Richmond, 1890-1891). y ’ '
^On Massachusetts finance, see Whitney K. Bates, “State Finances of
Massachusetts, 1780-1789" (Unpublished master's thesis. University of
Wisconsm, 1948).
FORREST MCDONALD 377
ample, that state’s Constitutionalist Party (those who became
anti-Federalists) caused the passage of an act simultaneously
funding the state debt and that portion of the national debt owned
in the state, and issuing £150,000 ($400,000) in paper money.
The Bank of North America opposed this action and offered to
lend the state $300,000 if it would not go through with the
scheme, but the Constitutionalist majority refused. As one writer
said of the entire program, "to unravel the code of policy which
it contains, requires no small amount of sagacity and Machiavelian
shrewdness.” The principal elements in the code of policy it con¬
tained, however, are clearly visible: a calculated app eal to an
existing interest group and a scheme for enriching the politicians
who devised the program. The existing interest group was the
public creditors, to whom the program was made immediately
palatable by the payment of £100,000 of the new money to them
for back interest on their holdings of national debt. The remainder
of the paper was issued on loan. Constitutionalist insiders bor¬
rowed the paper from the state on long-term, easy credit, and
invested in the securities being funded. Thus such Constitution¬
alists as Charles Pettit, William Moore, John Bayard, Frederick
Kuhl, William Will, John Steinmetz, and William Irvine, all hold¬
ers of several thousand pounds of public securities, profited; and
such Constitutionalists as Joseph Heister, John Bishop, Nicholas
Lotz, John Hanna, William Brown, William Findley, James Mar¬
tin, and Robert White hi ll, most of them back-country politicians
who had not previously owned any securities, suddenly emerged
with profits of several thousand dollars apiece from the rise in
security prices. 25
In 1787, Constitutionalist Party leaders formed a strong phalanx
against ratification, but, not surprisingly, they were grossly lack¬
ing in public support. 26
If space permitted, similar developments in virtually all other
^Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (New York, 1950), 316-317; Phila¬
delphia Evening Herald, March 8, 1785; Philadelphia Pennsylvania Packet ,
throughout January, 1784, March 31, April 1, 1785; New Loan Certificates,
vol. A, accounts 1, 2, 3, 60, 225, 230, 262, 1775-1802, 1954-1958, 2718-
2724, 4915, 4919-4925, 5381, vol. B, accounts 10, 391, 6177-6184, 10525-
10526, 10528, vol. C, accounts 37, 54, 120, 126, vol. D, 19235-19241, all
manuscript volumes in the Public Records Division of the Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum Commission; Records of the Loan of 1790, vol.
54, no. 2, folio 330, vol. 610, folios 23, 24, 39, 43, 45, vol. 611, folios 21,
23, 25, 114-115, vol. 612, accounts 8693, 8976-9025, vol. 624, folio 40, vol.
630, folios 48, 49, 122, 309, vol. 631, folios 223, 250, 298.
a8 The Pennsylvania convention ratified the Constitution by a vote of 46
to 23. The standard work on ratification in Pennsylvania is John Bach
McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Con¬
stitution , 1787—1788 (Philadelphia, 1888).
378 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
states could be described. In Rhode Island the habit of mixing
public policy and private gain was perhaps deepest rooted and
highest developed; interestingly, this was also the state that offered
the greatest resistance to the Constitution. But the existence of
strong vested interest groups in Connecticut, Maryland, and North
Carolina—all of whom became anti-Federalists—is abundantly
evident, and traces of the phenomenon axe visible elsewhere.
I would leave you, not with a summary or a conclusion, but
with a question. The foregoing data, all of which are profusely
documentable, smack strongly of a knaves-and-fools interpreta¬
tion of anti-Federalism. Knaves and fools is precisely what Fed¬
eralists charged their opponents were—the knaves, in their view,
being the groups with vested interests in state governments, and
the fools being both the ideologues and the uninformed or mis¬
informed. The anti-Federalists, on the other hand, regularly
charged that Federalists were knaves, but rarely accused them of
being fools. Federalists viewed themselves as friends of the
nation; anti-Federalists depicted themselves as friends of the
people.
My question is this: if it is true, as I believe it to be, that as a
general rule the verdict of history has been the view held by the
winner—that of the Patriots over that of the Loyalists, of Jefferson
over Hamilton, of Jackson over Biddle, of Franklin Roosevelt over
Sam Insull—then how did it happen that historians have, in the
main, preferred the anti-Federalists’ description of themselves and
of their opponents?
The Founding Fathers:
Young Men of the Revolution
STANLEY ELKINS and ERIC MCKITRICK
The intelligent American of today may know a great deal about
his history, but the chances are that he feels none too secure about
the Founding Fathers and the framing and ratification of the
Federal Constitution. He is no longer certain what the “enlight-
Reprinted from The Political Science Quarterly , LXXVI, 2 (June, 1961),
181—183, 200-216. Reprinted with permission of the authors.
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 379
ened” version of that story is, or even whether there is one. This
is because, in the century and three quarters since the Constitu¬
tion was written, our best thinking on that subject has gone
through two dramatically different phases and is at this moment
about to enter a third.
Americans in the nineteenth century, whenever they reviewed
the events of the founding, made reference to an Olympian gath¬
ering of wise and virtuous men who stood splendidly above all
faction, ignored petty self-interests, and concerned themselves
only with the freedom and well-being of their fellow-countrymen.
This attitude toward the Fathers has actually never died out; it
still tends to prevail in American history curricula right up
through most of the secondary schools. But bright young people
arriving at college have been regularly discovering, for nearly the
last fifty years, that in the innermost circle this was regarded as
an old-fashioned, immensely oversimplified, and rather dewey-
eyed view of the Founding Fathers and their work. Ever since
J. Allen Smith and Charles Beard wrote in the early years of the
twentieth century, the "educated” picture of the Fathers has been
that of a group not of disinterested patriots but of hardfisted con¬
servatives who were looking out for their own interests and those
of their class. According to this worldlier view, the document
which they wrote—and in which they embodied these interests—
was hardly intended as a thrust toward popular and democratic
government. On the contrary, its centralizing tendencies all re¬
flected the Fathers’ distrust of the local and popular rule which
had been too little restrained under the Articles of Confederation.
The authors of the Constitution represented the privileged part of
society. Naturally, then, their desire for a strong central govern¬
ment was, among other things, an effort to achieve solid national
guarantees for the rights of property—rights not adequately pro¬
tected under the Articles—and to obtain for the propertied class
(their own) a favored position under the new government.
This "revisionist” point of view—that of the Founding Fathers as
self-interested conservatives—has had immeasurable influence in
the upper reaches of American historical thought. Much of what
at first seemed audacious to the point of lese majeste came ulti¬
mately to be taken as commonplace. The Tory-like, almost back¬
ward-turning quality which this approach has imparted to the
picture of constitution-making even renders it plausible to think
of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 as a counter-revolutionary
conspiracy, which is just the way a number of writers have ac¬
tually described it. That is, since the Articles of Confederation
380 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
were the product of the Revolution, to overthrow the Articles was
—at least symbolically—to repudiate the Revolution. The Decla¬
ration of Independence and the Constitution represented two very
different, and in some ways opposing, sets of aspirations; and (so
the reasoning goes) the Philadelphia Convention was thus a sig¬
nificant tuming-away from, rather than an adherence to, the
spirit of the Declaration.
In very recent years, however, a whole new cycle of writing and
thinking and research has been under way; the revisionists of the
previous generation are themselves being revised. The economic
ideas of the late Professor Beard, which dominated this field for
so long, have been partially if not wholly discredited. And yet
many of the old impressions, intermingled with still older ones,
persist. Much of the new work, moreover, though excellent and
systematic, is still in progress. Consequently the entire subject of
the Constitution and its creation has become a little murky; new
notions having the clarity and assuredness of the old have not as
yet fully emerged; and meanwhile one is not altogether certain
what to think.
Before the significance of all this new work can be justly as¬
sessed, and before consistent themes in it may be identified with
any assurance, an effort should be made to retrace somewhat
the psychology of previous conceptions. At the same time, it
should be recognized that any amount of fresh writing on this
subject will continue to lack something until it can present us
with a clear new symbolic image of the Fathers themselves. The
importance of this point lies in the function that symbols have
for organizing the historical imagination, and the old ones are
a little tired. The “father” image is well and good, and so also
in certain respects is the “conservative” one. But we may suppose
that these men saw themselves at the time as playing other roles
too, roles that did not partake so much of retrospection, age, and
restraint as those which would come to be assigned to them in
after years. The Republic is now very old, as republics go, yet it
was young once, and so were its founders. With youth goes
energy, and the “energy” principle may be more suggestive now,
in reviewing the experience of the founding, than the principle of
paternal conservatism.
The work of Merrill Jensen, done in the 1930's and 1940's, has
suffered somewhat in reputation due to the sweep and vehemence
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 381
of the anti-Beardian reaction. Yet that work contains perceptions
which ought not to be written off in the general shuffle. They de¬
rive not so much from the over-all Beardian traditions and influ¬
ences amid which Jensen wrote, as from that particular sector
of the subject which he marked off and preempted for his own.
Simply by committing himself—alone among Beardians and non-
Beardians—to presenting the Confederation era as a legitimate
phase of American history, entitled to be taken seriously like any
other and having a positive side as well as a negative one, he has
forced upon us a peculiar point of view which, by the same token,
yields its own special budget of insights. For example, Jensen has
been profoundly impressed by the sheer force, determination, and
drive of such nationalist leaders as Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Knox,
and the Morrises. This energy, he feels, created the central prob¬
lem of the Confederation and was the major cause of its collapse.
He deplores this, seeing in the Confederation "democratic” virtues
which it probably never had, finding in the Federalists an "aristo¬
cratic” character which in actual fact was as much or more to be
found in the Anti-Federalists, smelling plots everywhere, and in
general shaping his nomenclature to fit his own values and prefer¬
ences. But if Professor Jensen seems to have called everything by
the wrong name, it is well to remember that nomenclature is not
everything. The important thing—what does ring true—is that
this driving "nationalist” energy was, in all probability, central to
the movement that gave the United States a new government.
The other side of the picture, which does not seem to have en¬
gaged Jensen’s mind half so much, was the peculiar sloth and
inertia of the Anti-Federalists. Cecelia Kenyon, in a brilliant essay
on these men, 1 has shown them as an amazingly reactionary lot.
They were transfixed by the specter of power. It was not the power
of the aristocracy that they feared, but power of any kind, demo¬
cratic or otherwise, that they could not control for themselves.
Their chief concern was to keep governments as limited and as
closely tied to local interests as possible. Their minds could not
embrace the concept of a national interest which they themselves
might share and which could transcend their own parochial con¬
cerns. Republican government that went beyond the compass of
state boundaries was something they could not imagine. Thus the
chief difference between Federalists and Anti-Federalists had little
to do with "democracy” (George Clinton and Patrick Henry were
1 Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representa¬
tive Government,” William and Mary Quarterly , XII, 3rd ser. (January
1955), 3-43.
382 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
no more willing than Gouvemeur Morris to trust the innate virtue
of the people), but rather in the Federalists’ conviction that there
was such a thing as national interest and that a government could
be established to care for it which was fully in keeping with re¬
publican principles. To the Federalists this was not only possible
but absolutely necessary, if the nation was to avoid a future of
political impotence, internal discord, and in the end foreign inter¬
vention. So far so good. But still, exactly how did such convictions
get themselves generated?
Merrill Jensen has argued that the Federalists, by and large,
were reluctant revolutionaries who had feared the consequences
of a break with England and had joined the Revolution only when
it was clear that independence was inevitable. The argument is
plausible; few of the men most prominent later on as Federalists
had been quite so hot for revolution in the very beginning as
Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. But this may not be altogether
fair; Adams and Henry were already veteran political campaigners
at the outbreak of hostilities, while the most vigorous of the future
Federalists were still mere youngsters. The argument, indeed,
could be turned entirely around: the source of Federalist, or na¬
tionalist, energy was not any "distaste” for the Revolution on these
men’s part, but rather their profound and growing involvement
in it.
Much depends here on the way one pictures the Revolution. In
the beginning it simply consisted of a number of state revolts
loosely directed by the Continental Congress; and for many men,
absorbed in their effort to preserve the independence of their own
states, it never progressed much beyond that stage even in the
face of invasion. But the Revolution had another aspect, one
which developed with time and left a deep imprint on those con¬
nected with it, and this was its character as a continental war
effort. If there is any one feature that most unites the future
leading supporters of the Constitution, it was their close engage¬
ment with this continental aspect of the Revolution. A remarkably
large number of these someday Federalists were in the Continental
Army, served as diplomats or key administrative officers of the
Confederation government, or, as members of Congress, played
leading roles on those committees primarily responsible for the
conduct of the war.
Merrill Jensen has compiled two lists, with nine names in each,
of the men whom he considers to have been the leading spirits
of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists respectively. It would be
well to have a good look at this sample. The Federalists—Jensen
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 383
calls them "nationalists”—were Robert Morris, John Jay, James
Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, James Duane, George
Washington, James Madison, and Gouvemeur Morris. Washington,
Knox, and Hamilton were deeply involved in Continental military
affairs; Robert Morris was Superintendent of Finance; Jay was
president of the Continental Congress and minister plenipotentiary
to Spain (he would later be appointed Secretary for Foreign Af¬
fairs); Wilson, Duane, and Gouvemeur Morris were members of
Congress, all three being active members of the war committees.
The Anti-Federalist group presents a very different picture. It
consisted of Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee,
George Clinton, James Warren, Samuel Bryan, George Bryan,
George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry. Only three of these—Gerry,
Lee, and Adams—served in Congress, and the latter two fought
consistently against any effort to give Congress executive powers.
Their constant preoccupation was state sovereignty rather than
national efficiency. Henry and Clinton were active war governors,
concerned primarily with state rather than national problems,
while Warren, Mason, and the two Bryans were essentially state
politicians.
The age difference between these two groups is especially strik¬
ing. The Federalists were on the average ten to twelve years
younger than the Anti-Federalists. At the outbreak of the Revolu¬
tion George Washington, at 44, was the oldest of the lot; six were
under 35 and four were in their twenties. Of the Anti-Federalists,
only three were under 40 in 1776, and one of these, Samuel
Bryan, the son of George Bryan, was a boy of 16.
This age differential takes on a special significance when it is
related to the career profiles of the men concerned. Nearly half
of the Federalist group—Gouvemeur Morris, Madison, Hamilton,
and Knox—quite literally saw their careers launched in the Rev¬
olution. The remaining five—Washington, Jay, Duane, Wilson,
and Robert Morris—though established in public affairs before¬
hand, became nationally known after 1776 and the wide public
recognition which they subsequently achieved came first and fore¬
most through their identification with the continental war effort.
All of them had been united in an experience, and had formed
commitments, which dissolved provincial boundaries; they had
come to full public maturity in a setting which enabled ambition,
public service, leadership, and self-f ulfillm ent to be conceived, for
each in his way, with a grandeur of scope unknown to any pre¬
vious generation. The careers of the Anti-Federalists, on the other
hand, were not only state-centered but—aside from those of
^ /UL {JL.
384 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Clinton, Gerry, and the young Bryan—rested heavily on events
that preceded rather than followed 1776.
As exemplars of nationalist energy, two names in Professor
Jensen’s sample that come most readily to mind are those of
Madison and Hamilton. The story of each shows a wonderfully
pure line of consistency. James Madison, of an influential Virginia
family but with no apparent career plans prior to 1774, assumed
his first public role as a member of the Orange County Revolu¬
tionary Committee, of which his father was chairman. As a dele¬
gate from Orange County he went to the Virginia convention in
1776 and served on the committee that drafted Virginia’s new
constitution and bill of rights. He served in the Virginia Assembly
in 1776 and 1777 but failed of re-election partly because he re¬
fused to treat his constituents to whisky. (He obviously did not
have the right talents for a state politician.) In recognition of
Madison’s services, however, the Assembly elected him to the
Governor’s Council, where he served from 1778 to 1780. Patrick
Henry was then Governor; the two men did not get on well and in
time became bitter political enemies. At this period Madison’s
primjifry concern was with supplying and equipping the Conti¬
nental Army, a concern not shared to his satisfaction by enough
of his colleagues. It was then, too, that he had his first experience
with finance and the problems of paper money. He was elected to
the Continental Congress in 1780, and as a member of the South¬
ern Committee was constantly preoccupied with the military op¬
erations of Nathanael Greene. The inefficiency and impotence of
Congress pained him unbearably. The Virginia Assembly took a
strong stand against federal taxation which Madison ignored,
joining Hamilton in the unsuccessful effort to persuade the states
to accept the impost of 1783. From the day he entered politics up
to that time, the energies of James Madison were involved in con¬
tinental rather than state problems—problems of supply, enlist¬
ment, and finance—and at every point his chief difficulties came
from state parochialism, selfishness, and lack of imagination. His
nationalism was hardly accidental.
The career line of Alexander Hamilton, mutatis mutandis, is
functionally interchangeable with that of James Madison. Ambi¬
tious, full of ability, but a young man of no family and no money,
Hamilton arrived in New York from the provinces at the age of
17 and in only two years would be catapulted into a brilliant
career by the Revolution. At 19 he became a highly effective pam¬
phleteer while still a student at King’s College, was captain of an
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 385
artillery company at 21, serving with distinction in the New York
and New Jersey campaigns, and in 1777 was invited to join
Washington’s staff as a lieutenant-colonel. He was quickly ac¬
cepted by as brilliant and aristocratic a set of youths as could be
found in the country. As a staff officer he became all too familiar
with the endless difficulties of keeping the Continental Army in
the field from 1777 to 1780. With his marriage to Elizabeth
Schuyler in 1780 he was delightedly welcomed into one of New
York’s leading families, and his sage advice to his father-in-law
and Robert Morris on matters of finance and paper money won
him the reputation of a financial expert with men who knew an
expert when they saw one. He had an independent command at
Yorktown. He became Treasury representative in New York in
1781, was elected to Congress in 1782, and worked closely with
Madison in the fruitless and discouraging effort to create a na¬
tional revenue in the face of state particularism. In the summer
of 1783 he quit in despair and went back to New York. Never once
throughout all this period had Alexander Hamilton been involved
in purely state affairs. His career had been a continental one, and
as long as the state-centered George Clinton remained a power in
New York, it was clear that this was the only kind that could have
any real meaning for him. As with James Madison, Hamilton’s
nationalism was fully consistent with all the experience he had
ever had in public life, experience whose sole meaning had been
derived from the Revolution. The experience of the others—for
instance that of John Jay and Henry Knox—had had much the
same quality; Knox had moved from his bookstore to the command
of Washington’s artillery in little more than a year, while Jay’s
public career began with the agitation just prior to the Revolution
and was a story of steady advancement in continental affairs
from that time forward.
The logic of these careers, then, was in large measure tied to a
chronology which did not apply in the same way to all the men in
public life during the two decades of the 1770’s and 1780’s. A
significant proportion of relative newcomers, with prospects ini¬
tially modest, happened to have their careers opened up at a par¬
ticular time and in such a way that their very public personalities
came to be staked upon the national quality of the experience
which had formed them. In a number of outstanding cases energy,
initiative, talent, and ambition had combined with a conception
of affairs which had grown immense in scope and promise by
the close of the Revolution. There is every reason to think that
386 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
a contraction of this scope, in the years that immediately followed,
operated as a powerful challenge.
The stages through which the constitutional movement pro¬
ceeded in the 1780’s add up to a fascinating story in political
management, marked by no little elan and dash. That movement,
viewed in the light of the Federalist leaders’ commitment to the
Revolution, raises some nice points as to who were the "conserva¬
tives” and who were the "radicals.” The spirit of unity generated
by the struggle for independence had, in the eyes of those most
closely involved in coordinating the effort, lapsed; provincial fac¬
tions were reverting to the old provincial ways. The impulse to ar¬
rest disorder and to revive the flame of revolutionary unity may be
pictured in "conservative” terms, but this becomes quite awkward
when we look for terms with which to picture the other impulse,
so different in nature: the urge to rest, to drift, to turn back the
clock.
Various writers have said that the activities of the Federalists
during this period had in them a clear element of the conspira¬
torial. Insofar as this refers to a strong line of political strategy,
it correctly locates a key element in the movement. Yet without
a growing base of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo, the
Federalists could have skulked and plotted forever without ac¬
complishing anything. We now know, thanks to recent scholarship,
that numerous elements of the public were only too ripe for
change. But the work of organizing such a sentiment was quite
another matter; it took an immense effort of will just to get it off
the ground. Though it would be wrong to think of the Constitution
as something that had to be carried in the face of deep and basic
popular opposition, it certainly required a series of brilliant ma¬
neuvers to escape the deadening clutch of particularism and
inertia. An Anti-Federalist "no” could register on exactly the same
plane as a Federalist "yes” while requiring a fraction of the energy.
It was for this reason that the Federalists, even though they can¬
not be said to have circumvented the popular will, did have to use
techniques which in their sustained drive, tactical mobility, and
risk-taking smacked more than a little of the revolutionary.
By 1781, nearly five years of intimate experience with the war
effort had already convinced such men as Washington, Madison,
Hamilton, Duane, and Wilson that something had to be done to
strengthen the Continental government, at least to the point of
providing it with an independent income. The ratification of the
Articles of Confederation early in the year (before Yorktown)
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 387
seemed to offer a new chance, and several promising steps were
taken at that time. Congress organized executive departments of
war, foreign affairs, and finance to replace unwieldy and ineffi¬
cient committees; Robert Morris was appointed Superintendent of
Finance; and a 5 percent impost was passed which Congress
urged the states to accept.
By the fall of 1782, however, the surge for increased efficiency
had lost the greater part of its momentum. Virginia had changed
its mind about accepting the impost, Rhode Island having been
flatly opposed all along, and it became apparent that as soon as
the treaty with England (then being completed) was ratified, the
sense of common purpose which the war had created would be
drained of its urgency. At this point Hamilton and the Morrises,
desperate for a solution, would have been quite willing to use the
discontent of an unpaid army as a threat to coerce the states out
of their obstructionism, had not Washington refused to lend him¬
self to any such scheme. Madison and Hamilton thereupon joined
forces in Congress to work out a revenue bill whose subsidiary
benefits would be sufficiently diffuse to gain it general support
among the states. But in the end the best that could be managed
was a new plan for a 5 percent impost, the revenues of which
would be collected by state-appointed officials. Once more an ap¬
peal, drafted by Madison, was sent to the states urging them to
accept the new impost, and Washington wrote a circular in sup¬
port of it. The effort was in vain. The army, given one month’s pay
in cash and three in certificates, reluctantly dispersed, and the
Confederation government, with no sanctions of coercion and no
assured revenues, now reached a new level of impotence. In June,
1783, Alexander Hamilton, preparing to leave Congress to go back
to private life, wrote in discouragement and humiliation to Na¬
thanael Greene:
There is so little disposition either in or out of Congress to give
solidity to our national system that there is no motive to a man to
lose his time in the public service, who has no other view than to
promote its welfare. Experience must convince us that our present
establishments are Utopian before we shall be ready to part with them
for better.
Whether or not the years between 1783 and 1786 should be
viewed as a “critical period” depends very much on whose angle
they are viewed from. Although it was a time of economic de¬
pression, the depressed conditions were not felt in all areas of
economic life with the same force, nor were they nearly as dam-
388 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
aging In some localities as in others; the interdependence of
economic enterprise was not then what it would become later on,
and a depression in Massachusetts did not necessarily imply one
in Virginia, or even in New York. Moreover, there were definite
signs of improvement by 1786. Nor can it necessarily be said
that government on the state level lacked vitality. Most of the
states were addressing their problems with energy and decision.
There were problems everywhere, of course, many of them very
grave, and in some cases (those of New Jersey and Connecticut
in particular) solutions seemed almost beyond the individual
state’s resources. Yet it would be wrong, as Merrill Jensen points
out, to assume that no solutions were possible within the frame¬
work which then existed. It is especially important to remember
that when most people thought of "the government” they were
not thinking of Congress at all, but of their own state legislature.
For them, therefore, it was by no means self-evident that the
period through which they were living was one of drift and
governmental impotence.
But through the eyes of men who had come to view the states
collectively as a "country” and to think in continental terms,
things looked altogether different. From their viewpoint the
Confederation was fast approaching the point of ruin. Fewer
and fewer states were meeting their requisition payments, and
Congress could not even pay its bills. The states refused to accept
any impost which they themselves could not control, and even if
all the rest accepted, the continued refusal of New York (which
was not likely to change) would render any impost all but
valueless. Local fears and jealousies blocked all efforts to estab¬
lish uniform regulation of commerce, even though some such
regulation seemed indispensable. A number of the states. New
York in particular, openly ignored the peace treaty with England
and passed discriminatory legislation against former Loyalists;
consequently England, using as a pretext Congress’ inability to
enforce the treaty, refused to surrender the northwest posts.
Morale in Congress was very low as members complained that
lack of a quorum prevented them most of the time from trans¬
acting any business; even when a quorum was present, a few
negative votes could block important legislation indefinitely. Any
significant change, or any substantial increase in the power of
Congress, required unanimous approval by the states, and as
things then stood this had become very remote. Finally, major
states such as New York and Virginia were simply paying less
and less attention to Congress. The danger was not so much that
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 389
of a split with the Confederation—Congress lacked the strength
that would make any such "split” seem very urgent—but rather
a policy of neglect that would just allow Congress to wither away
from inactivity.
These were the conditions that set the stage for a fresh effort
—the Annapolis Convention of 1786—to strengthen the conti¬
nental government. The year before, Madison had arranged a
conference between Maryland and Virginia for the regulation of
commerce on the Potomac, and its success had led John Tyler
and Madison to propose a measure in the Virginia Assembly that
would give Congress power to regulate commerce throughout the
Confederation. Though nothing came of it, a plan was devised in
its place whereby the several states would be invited to take part
In a convention to be held at Annapolis in September, 1786, for
the purpose of discussing commercial problems. The snapping-
point came when delegates from only five states appeared. The
rest either distrusted one another’s intentions (the northeastern
states doubted the southerners’ interest in commerce) or else
suspected a trick to strengthen the Confederation government at
their expense. It was apparent that no serious action could be
taken at that time. But the dozen delegates who did come (Hamil¬
ton and Madison being in their forefront) were by definition those
most concerned over the state of the national government, and
they soon concluded that their only hope of saving it lay in some
audacious plenary gesture. It was at this meeting, amid the
mortification of still another failure, that they planned the Phila¬
delphia Convention.
The revolutionary character of this move—though some writers
have correctly perceived it—has been obscured both by the
stateliness of historical retrospection and by certain legal peculi¬
arities which allowed the proceeding to appear a good deal less
subversive than it actually was. The "report” of the Annapolis
meeting was actually a call, drafted by Hamilton and carefully
edited by Madison, for delegates of all the states to meet in
convention at Philadelphia the following May for the purpose of
revising the Articles of Confederation. Congress itself transmitted
the call, and in so doing was in effect being brought to by-pass
its own constituted limits. On the one hand, any effort to change
the government within the rules laid down by the Articles would
have required a unanimous approval which could never be ob¬
tained. But on the other hand, the very helplessness which the
several states had imposed upon the central government meant
in practice that the states were sovereign and could do anything
390 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
they pleased with it. It was precisely this that the nationalists
now prepared to exploit: this legal paradox had hitherto prevented
the growth of strong loyalty to the existing Confederation and
could presently allow that same Confederation, through the action
of the states, to be undermined in the deceptive odor of legiti¬
macy. Thus the Beardian school of constitutional thought, for all
its errors of economic analysis and its transposing of ideological
semantics, has called attention to one element—the element of
subversion—that is actually entitled to some consideration.
But if the movement had its plotters, balance requires us to
add that the "plot” now had a considerable measure of potential
support, and that the authority against which the plot was aimed
had become little more than a husk. Up to this time every na¬
tionalist move, including the Annapolis Convention, had been
easily blocked. But things were now happening in such a way
as to tip the balance and to offer the nationalists for the first
time a better-than-even chance of success. There had been a
marked improvement in business, but shippers in Boston, New
York, and Philadelphia were still in serious trouble. Retaliatory
measures against Great Britain through state legislation had
proved ineffective and useless; there was danger, at the same
time, that local manufacturing interests might be successful in
pushing through high state tariffs. In the second place, New
York's refusal to reconsider a national impost, except on terms
that would have removed its effectiveness, cut the ground from
under the moderates who had argued that, given only a little
time, everything could be worked out. This did not leave much
alternative to a major revision of the national government. Then
there were Rhode Island's difficulties with inflationary paper
money. Although that state's financial schemes actually made
a certain amount of sense, they provided the nationalists with
wonderful propaganda and helped to create an image of parochial
irresponsibility.
The most decisive event of all was Shays' Rebellion in the fall
and winter of 1786—1787. It was this uprising of hard-pressed
rural debtors in western Massachusetts that frightened moderate
people everywhere and convinced them of the need for drastic
remedies against what looked like anarchy. The important thing
was not so much the facts of the case as the impression which
it created outside Massachusetts. The Shaysites had no intention
of destroying legitimate government or of redistributing property,
but the fact that large numbers of people could very well imagine
them doing such things added a note of crisis which was all to
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 39I
the Federalists’ advantage. Even the levelheaded Washington
was disturbed, and his apprehensions were played upon quite
knowingly by Madison, Hamilton, and Knox in persuading him
to attend the Philadelphia Convention. Actually the Federalists
and the Shaysites had been driven to action by much the same
conditions; in Massachusetts their concern with the depressed
state of trade and the tax burden placed them for all practical
purposes on the same side, and there they remained from first
to last.
Once the balance had been tipped in enough states, to the
point of a working consensus on the desirability of change, a
second principle came into effect. Unless a state were absolutely
opposed—as in the extreme case of Rhode Island—to any change
in the Articles of Confederation, it was difficult to ignore the
approaching Philadelphia Convention as had been done with
the Annapolis Convention: the occasion was taking on too much
importance. There was thus the danger, for such a state, of
seeing significant decisions made without having its interests
consulted. New York, with strong Anti-Federalist biases but also
with a strong nationalist undercurrent, was not quite willing to
boycott the convention. Governor Clinton’s solution was to send
as delegates two rigid state particularists, John Yates and Robert
Lansing, along with the nationalist Hamilton, to make sure that
Hamilton would not accomplish anything.
We have already seen that nineteenth century habits of
thought created a ponderous array of stereotypes around the
historic Philadelphia conclave of 1787. Twentieth century thought
and scholarship, on the other hand, had the task of breaking
free from them, and to have done so is a noteworthy achievement.
And yet one must return to the point that stereotypes themselves
require some form of explanation. The legend of a transcendent
effort of statesmanship, issuing forth in a miraculously perfect
instrument of government, emerges again and again despite all
efforts either to conjure it out of existence or to give it some sort
of rational linkage with mortal affairs. Why should the legend
be so extraordinarily durable, and was there anything so special
about the circumstances that set it on its way so unerringly and
so soon?
The circumstances were, in fact, special; given a set of dele¬
gates of well over average ability, the Philadelphia meeting pro¬
vides a really classic study in the sociology of intellect. Divine
accident, though in some measure present in men’s doings always,
is not required as a part of this particular equation. The key
39 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
conditions were all present in a pattern that virtually guaranteed
for the meeting an optimum of effectiveness. A sufficient number
of states were represented so that the delegates could, without
strain, realistically picture themselves as thinking, acting, and
making decisions in the name of the entire nation. They them¬
selves, moreover, represented interests throughout the country
that were diverse enough, and they had enough personal prestige
at home, that they could act in the assurance of having their
decisions treated at least with respectful attention. There had
also been at work a remarkably effective process of self-selection,
as to both men and states. Rhode Island ignored the convention,
and as a result its position was not even considered there. There
were leading state particularists such as Patrick Henry and Rich¬
ard Henry Lee who were elected as delegates but refused to serve.
The Anti-Federalist position, indeed, was hardly represented at
all, and the few men who did represent it had surprisingly little
to say. Yates and Lansing simply left before the convention was
over. Thus a group already predisposed in a national direction
could proceed unhampered by the friction of basic opposition in
its midst. This made it possible for the delegates to "try on”
various alternatives without having to remain accountable for
everything they said. At the same time, being relieved from all
outside pressures meant that the only way a man could expect
to make a real difference in the convention’s deliberations was
to reach, through main persuasion, other men of considerable
ability and experience. Participants and audience were therefore
one, and this in itself imposed standards of debate which were
quite exacting. In such a setting the best minds in the convention
were accorded an authority which they would not have had in
political debates aimed at an indiscriminate public.
Ihus the elements of secrecy, the general inclination for a
national government, and the process whereby the delegates came
to terms with their colleagues—appreciating their requirements
and adjusting to their interests—all combined to produce a grow¬
ing esprit de corps. As initial agreements were worked out, it
became exceedingly difficult for the Philadelphia delegates not
to grow more and more committed to the product of their joint
efforts. Indeed, this was in all likelihood the key mechanism, more
important than any other in explaining not only the peculiar
genius of the main compromises but also the general fitness of
the document as a whole. That is, a group of two or more intelli¬
gent men who are subject to no cross-pressures and whose prin-
cipal commitment is to the success of an idea, are perfectly
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 393
capable—as in our scientific communities of today—of perform¬
ing what appear to be prodigies of intellect. Moving, as it were,
in the same direction with a specific purpose, they can function
at maximum efficiency. It was this that the historians of the nine¬
teenth century did in their way see, and celebrated with sweeping
rhetorical flourishes, when they took for granted that if an occa¬
sion of this sort could not call forth the highest level of states¬
manship available, then it was impossible to imagine another
that could.
Once the Philadelphia Convention had been allowed to meet
and the delegates had managed, after more than three months
of work, to hammer out a document that the great majority of
them could sign, the political position of the Federalists changed
dramatically. Despite the major battles still impending, for prac¬
tical purposes they now had the initiative. The principal weapon
of the Anti-Federalists—inertia—had greatly declined in effective¬
ness, for with the new program in motion it was no longer enough
simply to argue that a new federal government was unnecessary.
They would have to take positive steps in blocking it; they would
have to arouse the people and convince them that the Constitution
represented a positive danger.
Moreover, the Federalists had set the terms of ratification in
such a way as to give the maximum advantage to energy and
purpose; the key choices, this time, had been so arranged that
they would fall right. Only nine states had to ratify before the
Constitution would go into effect. Not only would this rule out
the possibility of one or two states holding up the entire effort,
but it meant that the Confederation would be automatically de¬
stroyed as an alternative before the difficult battles in New York
and Virginia had to be faced. (By then, Patrick Henry in Virginia
would have nothing but a vague alliance with North Carolina
to offer as a counter-choice.) Besides, there was good reason to
believe that at least four or five states, and possibly as many as
seven, could be counted as safe, which meant that serious fighting
in the first phase would be limited to two or three states. And
finally, conditions were so set that the “snowball” principle would
at each successive point favor the Federalists.
As for the actual process of acceptance, ratification would be
done through state conventions elected for the purpose. Not only
would this circumvent the vested interests of the legislatures
and the ruling coteries that frequented the state capitals, but
it gave the Federalists two separate chances to make their case—
once to the people and once to the conventions. If the elected
394 reinterpretation of the American revolution
delegates were not initially disposed to do the desired thing, there
was still a chance, after the convention met, of persuading them.
Due partly to the hampering factor of transportation and dis¬
tance, delegates had to have considerable leeway of choice and
what amounted to quasi-plenipotentiary powers. Thus there could
be no such thing as a fully “instructed” delegation, and members
might meanwhile remain susceptible to argument and conversion.
The convention device, moreover, enabled the Federalists to run
as delegates men who would not normally take part in state
politics.
The revolutionary verve and ardor of the Federalists, their
resources of will and energy, their willingness to scheme tirelessly,
campaign everywhere, and sweat and agonize over every vote
meant in effect that despite all the hairbreadth squeezes and
rigors of the struggle, the Anti-Federalists would lose every
crucial test. There was, to be sure, an Anti-Federalist effort. But
with no program, no really viable commitments, and little pur¬
poseful organization, the Anti-Federalists somehow always man¬
aged to move too late and with too little. They would sit and
watch their great stronghold, New York, being snatched away
from them despite a two-to-one Anti-Federalists majority in a
convention presided over by their own chief, George Clinton. To
them, the New York Federalists must have seemed possessed
of the devil. The Federalists’ convention men included Alexander
Hamilton, James Duane, John Jay, and Robert Livingston—who
knew, as did everyone else, that the new government was doomed
unless Virginia and New York joined it. They insisted on debating
the Constitution section by section instead of as a whole, which
meant that they could out-argue the Anti-Federalists on every
substantive issue and meanwhile delay the vote until New Hamp¬
shire and Virginia had had a chance to ratify. (Madison and
Hamilton had a horse relay system in readiness to rush the
Virginia news northward as quickly as possible.) By the time
the New York convention was ready to act, ten others had ratified,
and at the final moment Hamilton and his allies spread the chill¬
ing rumor that New York City was about to secede from the state.
The Anti-Federalists, who had had enough, directed a chosen
number of their delegates to cross over, and solemnly capitulated.
In the end, of course, everyone “crossed over.” The speed with
which this occurred once the continental revolutionists had made
their point, and the ease with which the Constitution so soon
became an object of universal veneration, still stands as one of
the minor marvels of American history. But the document did
STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK 395
contain certain implications, of a quasi-philosophical nature,
that make the reasons for this ready consensus not so very diffi¬
cult to find. It established a national government whose basic
outlines were sufficiently congenial to the underlying commit¬
ments of the whole culture—republicanism and capitalism—that
the likelihood of its being the subject of a* true ideological clash
was never very real. That the Constitution should mount guard
over the rights of property—"realty,” "personalty,” or any other
kind—was questioned by nobody. There had certainly been a
struggle, a long and exhausting one, but we should not be de¬
ceived as to its nature. It was not fought on economic grounds; it
was not a matter of ideology; it was not, in the fullest and most
fundamental sense, even a struggle between nationalism and
localism. The key struggle was between inertia and energy; with
inertia overcome, everything changed.
There were, of course, lingering objections and misgivings;
many of the problems involved had been genuinely puzzling and
difficult; and there remained doubters who had to be converted.
But then the perfect bridge whereby all could become Federalists
within a year was the addition of a Bill of Rights. After the
French Revolution, anti-constitutionalism in France would be a
burning issue for generations; in America, an anti-constitutional
party was undreamed of after 1789. With the Bill of Rights, the
remaining opponents of the new system could say that, ever
watchful of tyranny, they had now got what they wanted. More¬
over, the Young Men of the Revolution might at last imagine,
after a dozen years of anxiety, that their Revolution had been
a success.
THE SPECTER OF FAILURE
The roots and nature of the anxieties that caused a
sizable number of the American political community to
fear for the success of the Revolution during the Con¬
federation period are explored in the two selections that
follow. The first selection demonstrates to what an ex¬
traordinary extent the Founding Fathers" reading of
history and, more specifically, their awareness and inter¬
pretation of the long record of failure of republican
government in both classical and modem times shaped
their responses to developments of the mid-17B0"s. They
became convinced, as a result, that an excess of democ¬
racy was the most serious danger confronting the United
States. Their theories and interpretations, moreover, gave
the clamor for paper money in 1785-1786 and Shays"
Rebellion an especially frightening aspect. Shays" Rebel¬
lion, in particular, seemed to portend not just social anar¬
chy but the failure of the whole American experiment in
republicanism. That it should have occurred because a
large body of the citizenry could not obtain redress of
grievances through normal constitutional processes in,
of all places, Massachusetts—the only state in which
the people lived under a constitution that they them¬
selves had made through specially-elected representatives
and to which they had given their collective approval—
was, as the second selection makes clear, an especially
ominous sign, a certain indication of the eventful degen¬
eration of the young republic into either a popular or
aristocratic tyranny. To solve the basic problem, to
achieve a government that was more sensitive to the
grievances of the public, required, as the author of the
second piece points out, the development of some mech¬
anism the political party, for example—through which
public opinion could be mobilized. In the 1780’s, how¬
ever, alarmed observers tended to pin their hopes upon
the creation of a central government with sufficient
strength to provide both a stable environment within
which the sensitive republican plant could be properly
nourished and some check on any petty tyrannies that
might arise in the individual states.
396
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 397
douglass g. adair (1912-1968) was a member of the
Department of History at the Clarement Graduate School;
j. r. pole (b. 1922) is Reader in American History at
Churchill College, Cambridge.
j Experience Must Be Our Only Guide:
History, Democratic Theory } and the
United States Constitution
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR
‘The history of Greece,” John Adams wrote in 1786, "should
be to our countrymen what is called in many families on the
Continent, a boudoir, an octagonal apartment in a house, with
a full-length mirror on every side, and another in the ceiling.
The use of it is, when any of the young ladies, or gentlemen
if you will, are at any time a little out of humour, they may
retire to a place where, in whatever direction they turn their
eyes, they see their own faces and figures multiplied without
end. By thus beholding their own beautiful persons, and seeing,
at the same time, the deformity brought upon them by their
anger, they may recover their tempers and their charms to¬
gether.” 1
Adams’ injunction that his countrymen should study the history
of ancient Greece in order to amend their political behavior
suggests two points for our consideration. First, John Adams
assumed without question that history did offer lessons and
precepts which statesmen could use in solving immediate prob¬
lems. Secondly, Adams urged the study of the classical Greek
republics as the particular history especially relevant, most full
of useful lessons and precepts for Americans in 1787.
Adams, as is well known, practiced what he preached. Working
Reprinted with permission from Ray A. BiUington, ed.. The Reinterpre¬
tation of Early American History: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Pomfret
(San Marino, Calif., 1966), 129-148.
^ohn Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of Amer¬
ica (1787), in Charles F. Adams, ed.. The Works of John Adams (10 vols.,
Boston, 1850-1856), IV, 469. Hereafter cited as Defence, IV.
398 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
at high speed between October 1786 and January 1787, in time
stolen from his duties as United States Minister to Great Britain,
he composed his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States
—a 300-page book exhibiting for his countrymen the lessons of
history. And though he included material from all periods of
western civilization, a large part of his data was collected from
the classical republics of antiquity.
Nor did his American audience who read Adams’ work in the
weeks immediately prior to the meeting of the Philadelphia Con¬
vention deny his assumptions or purposes in urging them to
study the lessons of Greek history. Benjamin Rush, for example,
reporting to the Reverend Richard Price in England on the atti¬
tude of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Convention, gave
Adams study the highest praise. “Mr. Adams’ book,” he wrote,
“has diffused such excellent principles among us that there is
little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compounded federal
legislature. Our illustrious Minister in this gift to his country has
done us more service than if he had obtained alliances for us
with all the nations of Europe.” 2
Do Adams and Rush in their view on the utility of history for
the constitutional reforms of 1787 represent the typical attitude of
the members of the Convention? Did the fifty-five men gathered
to create a more perfect union consciously turn to past history
for lessons and precepts that were generalized into theories about
the correct organization of the new government? Did lessons
from the antique past, applied to their present situation, con¬
cretely affect their actions at Philadelphia? The evidence is over¬
whelming that they did, although the weight of modern commen¬
tary on the Constitution either ignores the Fathers’ conscious and
deliberate use of history and theory or denies that it played any
important part in their deliberations.
Max Farrand, for example, after years of study of the debates
in the Convention concluded that the members were anything
but historically oriented. Almost all had served (Farrand noted)
in the Continental Congress and had tried to govern under the
impotent Articles of Confederation. There is little of importance
in the Constitution (Farrand felt) that did not arise from the
effort to correct specific defects of the Confederation.
Robert L. Schuyler, an able and careful student of the Con¬
stitution, goes even further in denying the Convention’s depend-
Butterfieid, ed.. Letters of Benjamin Rush (2 vols., Princeton,
1951), I, 418; to Richard Price, Philadelphia, June 2, 1787.
DOUGDASS G. ADAIR 399
ence upon history. "The Fathers were practical men. They lived
at a time when a decent respect for the proprieties of political
discussion required at least occasional reference to Locke and
Montesquieu . . . but . . . such excursions into political philosophy
as were made are to be regarded rather as purple patches than
as integral parts of the proceedings. The scholarly Madison had
gone extensively into the subject of Greek federalism . . . but
it was his experience in public life and his wide knowledge of
the conditions of his day, not his classical lucubrations that bore
fruit at Philadelphia. . . . The debate . . . did not proceed along
theoretical lines. John Dickinson expressed the prevailing point
of view when he said in the Convention: ‘Experience must be our
only guide. Reason may mislead us/” 3
Dickinson’s statement on August 13th: "Experience must be
our only guide” does indeed express the mood of the delegates;
no word was used more often; time after time "experience” was
appealed to as the clinching argument for a controverted opinion.
But "experience” as used in the Convention, more often than not,
referred to the precepts of history. This is Dickinson’s sense of
the word when he warned the Convention that "reason” might
mislead. "It was not reason,” Dickinson continued, "that discovered
the singular and admirable mechanism of the English Constitution
. . . [or the] mode of trial by jury. Accidents probably produced
these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.”
And then Dickinson, turning to James Wilson and Madison who
had argued that vesting the power to initiate revenue bills ex¬
clusively in the lower house of the Legislature had proved "preg¬
nant with altercation in every [American] State where the [revo¬
lutionary] Constitution had established it,” denied that the short
"experience” of the American States carried as weighty a sanction
as the long historic "experience” of the English House of Com¬
mons. "Shall we oppose to this long [English] experience,” Dickin¬
son asked, "the short experience of 11 years which we had
ourselves, on this subject.” 4 Dickinson’s words actually point to
“Robert L. Schuyler, The Constitution of the United States (New York,
1923), 90-91.
4 Max Farr and, ed.. Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (4 vols..
New Haven, 1911—1937), n, under date of August 13, 1787. Unless other¬
wise noted, quotations from the Debates are from Madison’s “Notes.”
Dickinson, in noting that the English Constitution was not the result of
“reason” but of “accident,” is referring to the commonly held belief in the
eighteenth century that the most successful republican constitutions of
antiquity had almost without exception been drafted single-handed by a
semi-divine legislator at one creative moment in time: Moses, Lycurgus,
Minos, Zaleueus. For a discussion of this tradition see The Federalist , No.
400 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the fact that theories grounded in historical research are indeed
integral parts of the debate on the Constitution.
For Dickinson is not alone in using "experience” in this dual
fashion to refer both to political wisdom gained by participation
in events, and wisdom gained by studying past events. Franklin
and Madison, Butler and Mason, Wilson and Hamilton all appeal
to historical "experience” in exactly the same way. "Experience
shows” or "history proves” are expressions that are used inter¬
changeably throughout the Convention by members from all sec¬
tions of the United States. 5 Pure reason not verified by history
might be a false guide; the mass of mankind might indeed be the
slave of passion and unreason, but the fifty-five men who gathered
at Philadelphia in 1787 labored in the faith of the enlightenment
that experience-as-history provided "the least fallible guide of
human opinions,” 6 that historical experience is "the oracle of
truth, and where its responses are unequivocal they ought to be
conclusive and sacred.” 7
Schuyler’s insistence that the Fathers were "practical men” who
abhorred theory, associates him with a standard theme of Ameri¬
can anti-intellectualism that honors unsystematic "practicality”
and distrusts systematic theoretical thought. His argument, un¬
doubtedly too, reflects nineteenth-century theories of "progress-
evolution” that assume the quantitative lapse in time between
400 b.c. and 1787 a.d. a priori makes the earlier period irrelevant
for understanding a modem and different age. And, of course,
what came to be called "sound history” after 1880 when the
38. The two striking exceptions of constitutions not bom in the brain of
one great lawgiver were the English constitution and the Roman. On the
latter see Machiavellfs statement in Discourses on Livy (which Adams
quotes in his Defence , IV, 419): “Though that city [Rome] had not a
Lycurgus to model its constitution at first . . . yet so many were the acci¬
dents which happened in the contests betwixt the patricians and the ple-
bians, that chance effected what the lawgiver had not provided for.”
^Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention: Franklin, September 7,
Experience shewed”; Mason, June 4, “Experience, the best of all tests”:
Hamilton, June 18, “Theory is in this case fully confirmed by experience”;
Madison, June 28, ‘Experience . . . that instinctive monitor”; Butler, June
» *We have no way of judging of mankind but by experience.
Look at the history of Great Britain. . . .” H. Trevor Colboum uses a quo-
£ atn 5 Hei fy’s 1765 oration, “The Lamp of Experience,” as
hl l i hl % !? d ^ Uggestiv ? stud y of the w ay in which historical
interpretation helped transform a three-penny tax on molasses and a two-
penny tax on tea into revolutionary constitutional principles that Americans
7 ?* Colbourn ’ <The La ™V °f Experience’’ Whig
Hfflh965)^ the lntellectual 0rL 9 ins Of the American Revolution (Chapel
6 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist , No. 6.
7 James Madison, ibid.. No. 20.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 401
discipline came to roost in academic groves, is quite different
itself from the “history” that eighteenth-century statesmen found
most significant and useful. Modem historians have tended to
insist that the unique and the particular is the essence of “real
history”; in contrast the eighteenth-century historian was most
concerned and put the highest value on what was universal and
constant through time.
Eighteenth-century historians believed “that there is a great
uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages,
and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles
and operations. The same motives always produce the same
actions; the same events follow from the same causes. Ambition,
avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit;
these passions, mixed in various degrees, and distributed through
society, have been from the beginning of the world, and still are
the source of all the actions and enterprizes, which have ever
been observed among mankind. Would you know the sentiments,
inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study
well the temper and actions of the French and English.” Thus
David Hume, distinguished eighteenth-century historian and phi¬
losopher. 8
The method of eighteenth-century history for those who would
gain political wisdom from it followed from this primary assump¬
tion—it was historical-comparative synthesis. Again Hume speaks:
“Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that
history informs us of nothing new or strange, in this particular.
Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal prin¬
ciples of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of cir¬
cumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials,
from which we may form our observations and become acquainted
with the regular springs of human action and behavior. These
records . . . are so many collections of experiments, by which the
politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science,
in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher
becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and
other external objects, by the experiments which he forms con¬
cerning them.”
®David Hume, one of the most penetrating intellects of the age and
famed as a great contemporary historian, used “experience” in the same
fashion as Dickinson, Madison, et al., and offered analytic proof to show
why the two kinds of experience together might provide the highest measure
of practical wisdom. See Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding ,
Section VIII, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” from which this and the following
quotations are taken.
4°2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
John Adams would echo Hume’s argument and use the identical
metaphor in the preface to his Defence. ‘The system of legislators
are experiments made on human life, and manners, society and
government. Zoroaster, Confucius, Mithras, Odin, Thor, Mohamet,
Lycurgus, Solon, Romulus and a thousand others may be com¬
pared to philosophers making experiments on the elements.”
Adams was too discreet to list his own name with the Great
Legislators of the past, but in his own mind, we know from his
Diary and letters to his wife, he identified himself with Moses,
Lycurgus, and Solon as the Lawgiver of his state, Massachusetts'
whose republican constitution, based on his study of history, he
had written almost singlehanded in October 1779. Now eight
yeMs later his Defence both justified the form of government he
had prepared for his own state and “fixed the principles”—to
use Hume’s words—of the science of government that ought to
be followed in modeling a more perfect union of the states. Adams’
ook, m complete accord with eighteenth-century canons, was a
comparative-historical survey of constitutions reaching back to
Minos, Lycurgus, and Solon.
History proved, Adams felt sure, “that there can be no free
government without a democratical branch in the constitution.”
ut he was equally sure that “Democracy, simple democracy,
never had a patron among men of letters.” Rousseau, indeed, had
argued, as Adams pointed out, that “a society of Gods would
govern themselves democratically,” but this is really an ironic
admission by “the eloquent philosopher of Geneva that it is not
practicable to govern Men in this way.” For very short periods of
tune pure democracy had existed in antiquity, but “from the
rightful pictures of a democratical city, drawn by the masterly
pencils of ancient philosophers and historians, it may be con¬
jectured that such governments existed in Greece and Italy
[only] for short spaces of time."* Such is the nature of pure
democracy, or simple democracy, that this form of government
carries in its very constitution, infirmities and vices that doom
it to speedy disaster. Adams agreed completely with Jonathan
Swifts pronouncement that if the populace of a country actually
attempted to rule and establish a government by the people they
would soon become their “own dupe, a mere underworker and
tb?v r ^ aSer m tn J® t . for SOme sin S le tyrant whose state and power
they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an instinct as those
to ^ from * e Preface
XV, 303-327. ’ 98 ’ ^ Chapter I of “Democratic Republics,”
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 403
worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for beings of a
superior order to their own.” It was not surprising then to Adams
that when he surveyed contemporary Europe he found no func¬
tioning democracy. Indeed, governments that had even the slight¬
est "democratical mixture" in their constitutions "are annihilated
all over Europe, except on a barren rock, a paltry fen, an inacces¬
sible mountain, or an impenetrable forest.” The one great excep¬
tion outside of the American states where a democratic element
was part of the constitution was Britain, the great monarchical
or regal republic. And as Adams contemplated the English Con¬
stitution, he felt it to be "the most stupendous fabric of human
invention. . . . Not the formation of languages, not the whole
art of navigation and shipbuilding does more honor to the human
understanding than this system of government.” 10
The problem for Americans in 1787 was to recognize the prin¬
ciples exemplified in Britain, Adams thought, and to frame gov¬
ernments to give the people "a legal, constitutional” share in the
process of government—it should operate through representation;
there should be a balance in the legislature of lower house and
upper house; and there should be a total separation of the execu¬
tive from the legislative power, and of the judicial from both.
Above all, if the popular principles of government were to be
preserved in America it was necessary to maintain an independent
and powerful executive: "If there is one certain truth to be
collected from the history of all ages, it is this; that the people’s
rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitu¬
tion, can never be preserved without a strong executive, or, in
other words, without separating the executive from the legislative
power. If the executive power ... is left in the hands either of
an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the
legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic
poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted,
the people are undone.”
And then John Adams took on the role of scientific prophet.
If Americans learned the lessons that history taught, their
properly limited democratic constitutions would last for ages.
Only long in the future when "the present states become . . . rich,
powerful, and luxurious, as well as numerous, [will] their . . .
good sense . . . dictate to them what to do; they may [then] make
transitions to a nearer resemblance of the British constitution,”
and presumably make their first magistrates and their senators
hereditary.
^Quoted in Adams’ Defence , IV, 388.
404 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
But note the ambiguity which underlies Adams’ historical
thinking. Science, whether political or natural, traditionally has
implied determinism—scientific prediction is possible only because
what was, is, and ever shall be. Reason thus might be free to
discover the fixed pattern of social phenomena, but the phe¬
nomena themselves follow a pre-destined course of development.
The seventeenth-century reason of Isaac Newton discovered the
laws of the solar system, but no man could change those laws
or the pattern of the planets’ orbits; Karl Marx might in the
nineteenth century discover the scientific laws of economic insti¬
tutions, but no man could reform them or change the pattern in
which the feudal economy inevitably degenerated into bourgeois
economy, which in its turn worked inexorably toward its pre¬
determined and proletarian end.
In the same fashion Adams’ scientific reading of history com¬
mitted him and his contemporaries in varying degrees of rigidity
to a species of political determinism. History showed, so they
believed, that there were only three basic types of government:
monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, or government of the one,
the few, or the many. Moreover history showed, so they believed,
that each of these three types when once established had par¬
ticular and terrible defects—“mortal diseases,” Madison was to
call these defects—that made each pure type quickly degenerate:
Every monarchy tended to degenerate into a tyranny. Every aris¬
tocracy, or government of the few, by its very nature, was
predestined to evolve into a corrupt and unjust oligarchy. And
the democratic form, as past experience proved, inevitably worked
toward anarchy, class conflict, and social disorder of such viru¬
lence that it normally ended in dictatorship. 11
On this deterministic theory of a uniform and constant human
nature, inevitably operating inside a fixed pattern of limited
political forms, producing a predictable series of evil political
results, John Adams based his invitation to Americans to study
“The classification of the three pure forms of government with their
corrupt counterparts is a legacy from Greek political theory first stated by
Herodotus (c. 495-425 b.c.), which reached its most penetrating and com¬
prehensive statement in Aristotle’s (384-322 b.c.) Politics. It was Polybius
(201-120 b.c.), however, who first froze the earlier flexible analysis into a
doctrinaire theory of cyclical change in Book VI of his History. This classi¬
cal theory was “rediscovered” and popularized by various Renaissance think¬
ers, among them Machiavelli. It became important in English history in
the seventeenth century when republican thinkers like Harrington, Milton,
and Sidney became converts. See Zera Fink, The Classical Republicans
(Evanston, 1945). Adams’ Defence reprints Polybius, in Adams, Works , IV,
435 ff.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 405
the classical republics. This assumption of determinism explains
the constant and reiterated appeal to Greek and Roman "experi¬
ence" both during the Philadelphia Convention and in the State
ratifying conventions. At the beginning of the Revolution Adams
had invited his rebellious compatriots to study English history,
for from 1765 to 1776 the immediate and pressing questions of
practical politics related to the vices and corruption of the English
monarchy. 12 But after 1776 at which time Americans committed
their political destinies to thirteen democratic frames of govern¬
ment loosely joined in a Confederation, English monarchical
history became temporarily less relevant to American problems.
The American States of 1776 in gambling on democratic republics
stood alone in the political world. Nowhere in contemporary
Europe or Asia could Americans turn for reassuring precedents
showing functioning republican government. So, increasingly from
1776 to 1787, as Americans learned in practice the difficulties
of making republican systems work, the leaders among the Revo¬
lutionary generation turned for counsel to classical history. They
were obliged to study Greece and Rome if they would gain "ex¬
perimental" wisdom on the dangers and potentialities of the
republican form. Only in classical history could they observe the
long-range predictable tendencies of those very "vices” of their
democratic Confederacy that they were now enduring day by day.
It was these frightening lessons from classical history added
to their own present difficulties under the Confederation that
produced the total dimension of the crisis of 1787. 13 Standing, as
it were, in John Adams' hall of magic mirrors where past and
present merged in a succession of terrifying images, the Founding
Fathers could not conceal from themselves that republicanism in
12 Adams, Essay on the Federal and Canon Law (1765), in Works , III,
464—465.
13 American historians have praised one scholarly research memorandum
that Madison prepared for use at Philadelphia. This is his study, running
to eight printed pages, entitled “Notes on the Confederacy:—April 1787.
Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in Letters and Other
Writings of James Madison (4 vols., Philadelphia, 1867), I, 293—328. His¬
torians in contrast have generally ignored the twenty-two page historical
research memorandum, “Notes of Ancient and Modem Confederacies, Pre¬
paratory to the Federal Convention of 1787,” in ibid., I, 293-315, which
Madison rated of equal weight in reaching the conclusions that he voiced
at Philadelphia. These two memos which provided the theoretical founda¬
tion for the Virginia Plan and hence for the completed Constitution are
the most strikingly successful examples of the enlightenment ideal of a
rational attempt to reduce politics to a science put into practice. See my
essay, “'That Politics May be Reduced to a Science:’ David Hume, James
Madison, and the Tenth FederalistHuntington Library Quarterly, XX
(1957), 343-360.
406 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
America might already be doomed. Was it indeed possible to
maintain stable republican government in any of the thirteen
American States? And even if some of the States units could
maintain republicanism, could union be maintained in a repub¬
lican confederation?
The answer of history to both of these questions seemed to be
an emphatic "no.” As Alexander Hamilton reminded the Con¬
vention June 18th and later reminded the country speaking as
Publius, "It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics
of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and dis¬
gust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated,
and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were
kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of
tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these
only serve as short-lived contrasts to the furious storms that are
to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open themselves
to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from
the reflection, that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be
overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party
rage.” 14
Hamilton along with Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and every
educated eighteenth-century statesman thus knew from history
that the mortal disease of democratical republics was and always
would be the class struggle that had eventually destroyed every
republican state in history. 15 And now with the "desperate debtor”
Daniel Shays, an American Cataline—an American Alcibiades—
proving only ten years after independence, the class struggle was
raising monitory death’s-heads among the barely united republican
States of America. If potential class war was implicit in every
republic, so too did war characterize the interstate relations of
adjacent republics. The only union that proved adequate to unite
Athens and Sparta, Thebes and Corinth in one functioning peace¬
ful whole was the monarchical power of Philip of Macedon;
Rome, after conquering her neighbor city states, it is true, had
maintained republican liberty for a relatively long period, in spite
of internal conflict of plebes and patricians, but when the Empire
increased in extent, when her geographical boundaries were
“Hamilton, The Federalist, No. 9.
“Major William Pierce, one of the Georgia delegates to the Convention,
wrote character sketches of all the delegates. It is significant that he con¬
sistently singles out those who have a “compleat classical education” as
being particularly well qualified for the role of American Solons and Lycur-
guses. Note his comments on Baldwin, Dayton, H amil ton, Ingersoll, John¬
son, King, Livingston, Madison, G. Morris, Patterson, C. Pinckney, Randolph,
Wilson, and Wythe.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 407
enlarged, Homan liberty died and an Emperor displaced the
Senate as the center of Roman authority. In 1787 the authority
of scholars, philosophers, and statesmen was all but unanimous
in arguing (from the experience of history) that no republic
ever could be established in a territory as extended as the United
States—that even if established for a moment, class war must
eventually destroy every democratic republic. 16
These were the two lessons that Hamilton insisted in his great
speech of June 18 the Constitutional Convention must remember.
These were the lessons that were stressed in John Adams’ morbid
anatomy of fifty historic republican constitutions. This was the
theme of Madison’s arguments (which the Convention accepted)
for junking entirely the feeble Articles of the Confederation in
favor of a government that would, it was hoped, neutralize inter¬
state conflict and class war. It was because these lessons were
accepted by so many educated men in America that the com¬
mercial crisis of 1784—1785 had become a political crisis by 1786,
and a moral crisis by 1787.
Had the Revolution been a mistake from the beginning? Had
the blood and treasure of Americans spent in seven years of
war against England ironically produced republican systems in
which rich and poor New Englanders must engage in bloody
class war among themselves? Had independence merely guaran¬
teed a structure in which Virginians and Pennsylvanians would
cut each others’ throats until one conquered the other or some
foreign crown conquered both? 17
M One of the chief arguments of the Anti-Federalists against the Constitu¬
tion was that the country was too large for unified national government
which in an extensive area could function efficiently only as a despotism.
See the covering letter of Senators R. H. Lee and William Grayson, Septem¬
ber 28, 1789, submitting proposed amendments to the Constitution to the
Virginia legislature: "We know of no instances in History that shew a
people ruled in Freedom when subject to an individual Government, and
inhabiting a Territory so extensive as that of the United States.” "Agrippa”
(Massachusetts Gazette, December 3, 1787) along with dozens of other
spokesmen had made the same point over and over in 1787—1788: "It is
the opinion of the ablest writers on the subject [of government] that no
extensive empire can be governed upon republican principles.” For a bril¬
liant analysis of the sterile and essentially undemocratic nature of the Anti-
Federalist attacks on the Constitution see Cecelia Kenyon, "Men of Little
Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,”
William and Mary Quarterly, XII (1955), 3-43, and the introduction to
The Antifederalists (Indianapolis, 1966).
17 Note Franklin’s speech on the final day of the Convention, September,
17, urging all members to sign the Constitution even if they disapproved
of parts: "I th ink it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confi¬
dence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the builders
of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet
hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”
408 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
From our perspective, 179 years later, this may appear an
hysterical and distorted analysis of the situation of the United
States in 1787, but we, of course, are the beneficiaries of the
Fathers’ practical solution to this problem that their reading of
history forced upon them. Americans today have the historic
experience of living peacefully in the republic stabilized by their
Constitution. History has reassured us concerning what only the
wisest among them dared to hope in 1787: that the republican
form could indeed be adapted to a continental territory. Priestley,
a sympathetic friend of the American Revolution was speaking
the exact truth in 1791 when he said: "It was taken for granted
that the moment America had thrown off the yoke of Great
Britain, the different states would go to war among themselves.”
When Hamilton presented his analysis of the vices of republi¬
canism to his acceptant audience in Philadelphia, he also offered
the traditional remedy which statesmen and philosophers from
antiquity on had proposed as the only cure for the evils of the
three types of pure government. This remedy was to "mix” or
"compound” elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy
into one balanced structure. 18 There was, Hamilton reasoned,
little danger of class war in a state which had a king vested with
more power than the political organs of government representing
either the rich or the poor. The "size of the country” and the
"amazing turbulence” of American democracy made him despair
of republicanism in the United States, without an elective mon¬
arch who once in office could not be voted out by majority rule.
The people, ie., the multitudinous poor, would directly elect the
lower house of the legislature; a Senate to represent the rich
would be elected for life; and to guard against the poison of
democracy in the separate States, they would be transformed into
administrative districts with their governors appointed by the
elected King.
We mistake the significance of Hamilton’s proposal of an
elective monarch as a solution of the crisis of 1787 if we think
of his plan as either original or unrepresentative of the thought
of important segments of American opinion in 1787. The strength
of Hamilton’s logical position lay in the fact that his proposal
was the traditional, the standard, indeed, as history showed the
only solution for the specific dangers of interclass and interstate
18 For the theory of the ideal mixed or compounded government, sometimes
called balanced government, see Stanley Pargellis, “The Theory of Balanced
Government,” in Conyers Read, The Constitution Reconsidered (New York,
1938), 37-49; John Adams, Defence, passim; Hamilton, Speech of June 18.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 409
conflict that were destroying the imperfect Union. As early as
1776 Carter Braxton had offered almost this identical plan as the
ideal constitution for Virginia. 19 In May, 1782, reasoning parallel
to Hamilton's had emboldened Colonel Lewis Nicola to invite
Washington to use the Army to set himself up as a King. 20 And
after Shays’ rebellion voices grew louder, particularly in the New
England and the Middle States, proposing two cures for the ills
of America. One cure was to divide the unwieldy Confederation
into two or three small units; the other was the creation of an
American throne. 21 We have Washington’s word for it that the
most alarming feature of this revival of monarchial sentiment
was its appearance among staunch “republican characters”—
men who like Hamilton had favored independence in 1776 but
who had become disillusioned about ever achieving order and
security in a republic. Add to this group of new converts the
large bloc of old Tories who had never forsaken their allegiance
to monarchy, and it is easy to see why Washington, Madison, and
other leaders were seriously alarmed that Union would break
up and that kings would reappear in the Balkanized segments.
Furthermore, at the very time the Philadelphia Convention was
rejecting Hamilton’s mixed-monarchy as a present solution for
the vices of American democracy, leading members of the Con¬
vention most tenacious of republicanism accepted the fact that
an American monarchy was inevitable at some future date. As
Mr. Williamson of North Carolina remarked, on July 24, “it was
pretty certain . . . that we should at some time or other have a
king; but he wished no precaution to be omitted that might
postpone the event as long as possible.” 22 There is a curious
statistical study of Madison’s which points to his certainty also,
along with the precise prophecy that the end of republicanism in
the United States would come approximately 142 years after
1787—about the decade of the 1930’s. 23 John Adams’ Defence
18 Address to the Convention ... of Virginia . . . By a Native of the Colony
(June, 1776), in Peter Force, ed., American Archives (Washington, 1837-
1853), 4th Ser., 747-754.
^Colonel Lewis Nicola, in Dictionary of American Biography (21 vols..
New York, 1928-1937), XHI, 509-510.
“Madison to Pendleton, February 24, 1787, in Letters and Other Writings
of James Madison , I, 280; Louise Dunbar, A Study of Monarchial Tendencies
in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (Urbana, 1922). The latter collects
a mass of contemporary material on this topic, including the Braxton
pamphlet and the Nicola letter.
“Williamson in the Convention, July 24.
33 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison , IV, 21, 29-30. The
statistical estimate was of probable American population growth which
Madison thought, in 1829, would by 1929 be 192,000,000. This would end
410 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
contains the same sort of prophecy. "In future ages,” Adams
remarked, "if the present States become great nations, rich, power¬
ful, and luxurious, as well as numerous,” the "feelings and good
sense” of Americans "will dictate to them” reform of their govern¬
ments "to a nearer resemblance of the British Constitution,”
complete with a hereditary king and a hereditary Senate. 24
Gouvemeur Morris is reported to have argued during the Con¬
vention "we must have a Monarch sooner or later . . . and the
sooner we take him while we are able to make a Bargain with
him, the better.” Nor did the actual functioning of the Constitu¬
tion during its first decade of existence lighten Morris’ pessimism;
in 1804 he was arguing that the crisis would come sooner rather
than later. 25 Even Franklin, the least doctrinaire of the Fathers—
perhaps with Jefferson the most hopeful among the whole Revo¬
lutionary generation regarding the potentialities of American
democracy—accepted the long-range pessimism of the Hamilton¬
ian analysis. Sadly the aged philosopher noted, June 2, "There
is a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government. ... I
am apprehensive, therefore,—perhaps too apprehensive,—that
the government of these States may in future time end in mon¬
archy. But this catastrophe, I think may be long delayed. . . .” 26
The "precious advantage” that the United States had in 1787
that offered hope for a "republican remedy for the diseases most
incident to republican government”—the circumstance which
would delay the necessity of accepting Hamilton’s favored form
of mixed monarchy—lay in the predominance of small free-hold
farmers among the American population. Since the time of
Anstotle, it had been recognized that yeoman farmers—a middle
class between the greedy rich and the envious poor—provided
the nation’s “precious advantage” both of wide distribution of landed prop¬
erty and “universal hope of acquiring property.” At that time, being “nearly
as crowded’ as England or France, with a society increasingly polarized
between “wealthy capitalists and indigent laborers,” Madison feared an
amended Constitution more like England’s would be required.
^John Adams, Defence, IV, 358-359.
^Mason in 1792 reported this remark of Morris quoted in Dunbar, Mo-
narchial Tendencies, p. 91. In 1804, writing to Aaron Ogden, Morris, like
Adams and Madison, related the appearance of an American monarchy to
die growth of population and poverty. Jared Sparks, ed., The Life of
Gouvemeur Morris, with Selections from his Correspondence (3 vols, Boston,
1832), III, 217.
^Franklin, June 2. It should be noted that acceptance of the deterministic
theory of the u nmix ed democratic form swinging inevitably to the opposite
extreme of despotism explains the number of prophets—Hamilton, Morris
in America; Burke in England—who foretold the eventual advent of Na¬
poleon almost as soon as the French Revolution began.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 411
the most stable foundation upon which to erect a popular govern¬
ment. This factor, commented on by Madison, Pinckney, Adams
and others, helps explain why the Convention did not feel it
necessary to sacrifice either majority rule or popular responsibility
in their new Constitution.
Of equal importance was the factor of expedience. Less doctri¬
naire than Alexander Hamilton, the leaders of the Convention
realized that a theoretical best—and member after member went
on record praising the British Constitution as the best ever
created by man—a theoretical best might be the enemy of a
possible good. As Pierce Butler insisted, in a different context,
‘The people will not bear such innovations. . . . Supposing such
an establishment to be useful, we must not venture on it. We
must follow the example of Solon who gave the Athenians not
the best government he could devise, but the best they would
receive.” 27
Consequently the Constitution that emerged from the Conven¬
tion’s debates was, as Madison described it a “novelty in the politi¬
cal world”—a “fabric” of government which had “no model on
the face of the globe.” 28 It was an attempt to approximate in a
structure of balanced republican government the advantages of
stability that such mixed governments as Great Britain’s had
derived from hereditary monarchy and a hereditary House of
Lords.
It was an “experiment” as members of the Convention frankly
admitted, but one about which most of the Fathers could be
hopeful because it adapted to the concrete circumstances of the
United States of 1787, the experience of mankind through all
ages as revealed by history. Driven by the collapse of the Con¬
federation, the depression of 1785-1786, and Shays’ Rebellion to
take stock of their political situation six years after Yorktown
had won for Americans the opportunity for self-government, the
Fathers had turned to history, especially classical history, to help
them analyze their current difficulties. Their reading of history,
equally with their immediate experience, defined for them both
the short-range and the long-range potentialities for evil inherent
in a uniform human nature operating in a republican govern¬
ment. But their reading of history also suggested a specific type
of government that would remedy the evils they already knew
and those worse evils they expected to come. Utilizing this knowl-
^Butler in debate on June 5. Compare Bedford of Delaware's use of the
same phrase from Plutarch’s Life of Solon in debate of June 30.
28 Madison, The Federalist , No. 14.
412 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
edge, building on the solid core of agreement which historical
wisdom had helped supply, they created, by mutual concession
and compromise, a governmental structure as nearly like mixed
government as it was possible to approach while maintaining the
republican principle of majority rule. And this they offered the
American people hoping it would be ratified, hoping that after
ratification their “experiment” with all its compromises of theory
and interest would provide a more perfect union.
If there is substance in the argument offered in the foregoing
paragraphs, it should throw some light, at least, on the intellectual
confusion exhibited during the last half-century by many learned
commentators in discussing the nature of our Constitution. This
confused and confusing debate has focused in part on the ques¬
tion: “did the Fathers write a ‘democratic’ Constitution?” 29 The
“In view of the number of able historiographical essays on the recent
revisionist literature about the "critical period” and the writings of the
Constitution, it seemed superfluous to add merely another. Two pamphlets
printed by the Service Center for Teachers of History that survey the current
historical literature on the theme, through 1962, are recommended for those
who wish to stand in the most modem historiographical boudoir —the con¬
temporary historian’s haU-of-mirrors. The first, Edmund S. Morgan’s The
American Revolution, A Review of Changing Interpretations (Washington,
1958), relates the monographic studies dealing with the period 1783-1787
to the general problem of interpreting the whole American Revolution; the
second, Stanley El k ins and Eric McKitrick’s The Founding Fathers: Young
Men of the Revolution (Washington, 1962), not only surveys critically his¬
torians’ commentaries on the framing of the Constitution, but also makes
the point that the group of young men who worked most intensely to achieve
a stronger national government and a more perfect union had staked their
political careers on the national rather than the state scene and thus
mingled their self-interest in status and power with a patriotic concern for
the national welfare.
Two books and two significant essays have also been published, since
1962, that must be considered by any serious student of the "critical period.”
Forrest McDonald, in E Pluribus Unum (Boston, 1965), continues his an¬
alysis, begun in We The People (Chicago, 1958), of the multiple economic
groups and burgeoning local economic appetites that existed in the United
States, post 1783. His most persuasive chapters show how selfish regional
and state parties and economic groups—in politics these normally became
Anti-Federalists in 1787—1788—had strained the tenuous Union to the ex¬
treme by 1787, so much so, in fact, that the success of the countervailing
movement of the men who wrote and got the Constitution ratified was, in
McDonald’s view, a "miracle.” In a ninety-page introduction to an anthology
of Anti-Federalist tracts, (see footnote 16 supra ), Cecelia M. Kenyon pro¬
vides the most thorough and wise analysis of the ideological stance of the
men who opposed ratification of the Constitution, in 1787-1788; and she
makes it clear that the Anti-Federalists were not majoritarian "democrats”
in any sense of the term.
Finally, two recent important articles in the William and Mary Quarterly
throw light on the problem of "democracy” and our Revolution. Richard
Buel, Jr., "Democracy and the American Revolution: A Frame of Reference,”
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 413
answers given have been almost as "mixed” as the theory to which
the Framers subscribed.
Part of the bother lies in the lack of precision with which the
word democracy was used then, and the even more unprecise
way that we use it now. The more a word is used the less exact
its meaning becomes, and in our day democratic/democracy has
been extended to describe art, foreign policy, literature, etc., etc.
Thus, from being a somewhat technical word of political dis¬
course, in 1787, it has become a perfect sponge of squashy
vagueness. Luckily, the context of formal theory that mixed
government did imply in 1787 does allow us to recognize certain
rather concrete and specific features usually associated, then, with
the democratic form of government. In the first place, the very
concept of "mixture” implies a relativism that modem doctrin¬
aire democrats often forget: a political system, in 1787, was
thought of as more-or-less democratic, as possessing few or many
democratic features. Only in the pure form was democracy an
either/or type of polity. In the second place, the simple demo¬
cratic form was almost always thought of as appropriate only
for a tiny territorial area—Madison in Federalist JO, for instance,
would only equate the word with the direct democracy of the
classical city-state. Thirdly, the functional advantages and dis¬
advantages of the pure democratic form of government were
almost universally agreed upon. A government by the people
(so it was thought) always possessed fidelity to the common
good; it was impossible for a people not to desire and to intend
to promote the general welfare. However, the vices of democracy
(3rd ser., XXI [1964], 165-190) makes the point that although Whig theory
before 1776 in British-America consistently defended the right of the people
to share in government, at the same time an unchecked, “simple,” or ‘'pure”
democracy was uniformly condemned by all American spokesmen. Jackson
Turner Main, in an essay in the same journal, "Government by the People:
The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures” (3rd
ser., XXIII [1966], 391-407), shows how, after 1776, "two interacting devel¬
opments occurred simultaneously: ordinary citizens increasingly took part
in politics, and American political theorists began to defend popular gov¬
ernment [i.e., simple democracy].” As my essay has argued, the Constitu¬
tional Convention was dominated by men who rejected the idea that
"simple” democracy was either a desirable or a safe form for the American
people. To a certain extent their ideas exemplify a limited, but definite,
reaction against both the institutional and theoretical "democratic” develop¬
ments that Professor Main charts. This shift and change in one leader’s
estimate of "democracy”—a vague and non-critical view of the American
peoples’ virtue before 1776, a positive praise of this virtue in 1776, and then
reservations about the wisdom and virtue of Americans, 1779 ff.—has been
ably analyzed by John It. Howe Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John
Adams (Princeton, 1966).
414 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
were that the people, collectively, were not wise about the correct
measures to serve this great end and that the people could be
easily duped by demagogues, who, flattering their good hearts
and muddled heads, would worm their way to unli m ited power.
It was this well-meaning stupidity, the capacity for thoughtless
injustice, the fickle instability of the popular will, that led the
classical theorists, who the Fathers were familiar with, to desig¬
nate “pure democracy” as a form doomed to a short existence
that tended to eventuate, with a pendulum swing, in the opposite
extreme of tyranny and dictatorship.
In dark contrast to this fidelity of the democratic many was the
vice afflicting both monarchy and aristocracy: an inveterate and
incorrigible tendency to use the apparatus of government to serve
the special selfish interests of the one or the few. However, the
aristocratic form offered, so it was believed, the best possibility of
wisdom, in planning public measures, while monarchy promised
the necessary energy, secrecy, and dispatch for executing policy. 30
It is in this ideological context that one can deduce some of
the intentions of the authors of our Constitution. It is clear, I
think, that the office and power of the President was consciously
designed to provide the energy, secrecy, and dispatch traditionally
associated with the monarchical form. Thus Patrick Henry, con¬
sidering the proposed Chief Executive and recognizing that the
President was not unlike an elective king, could cry with reason
that the Constitution “squints toward monarchy.” But it was
equally possible for Richard Henry Lee, focusing on the Senate,
to complain that the document had a “strong tendency to aristoc¬
racy.” This was said by Lee six months before Madison, in
Federalists 62-63, explicitly defended the Senate as providing the
wisdom and the stability —“aristocratic virtues”—needed to check
the fickle lack of wisdom that Madison predicted would charac¬
terize the people’s branch of the new government, the Lower
House. Nor were there other critics lacking who, recognizing that
the Constitution ultimately rested on popular consent, who, seeing
that despite the ingenious apparatus designed to temper the pop-
^Most of the modem discussion of the framing of the Constitution has
concerned itself with the domestic consequences of ratification. This, I
suspect, springs from the century of military security and isolation that so
deeply colored American thinking from 1815 to 1940. The dangers of the
international jungle we live in, that now makes foreign policy our primary
concern, has helped some of us recognize why a statesman like Hamilton
was obsessed with the need for a strong chief executive as a prime measure
of defense and security in the world of 1787, where foreign policy showed
the same jungle characteristics that frighten us.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 415
ular will by introducing into the compound modified monarchical/
aristocratic ingredients, could argue that the new Constitution
was too democratic to operate effectively as a national government
in a country as large and with a population as heterogeneous as
the Americans’. One such was William Grayson, who doubted the
need of any national government, but who felt, if one was to be
established, it ought to provide a President and a Senate elected
for life terms, these to be balanced by a House of Representatives
elected triennially. 31
It is, thus, significant that if modem scholars are confused and
disagreed about the nature of the Constitution today, so, too, in
1787-1788, contemporary observers were also confused and also
disagreed as to whether it was monarchical, aristocratic, or demo¬
cratic in its essence. 32
My own opinion is that the Constitution of 1787 is probably
best described in a term John Adams used in 1806. Writing to
Benjamin Rush, September 19, 1806, Adams, disapproving
strongly of Jefferson’s style as President, bemoaned the fact that
Jefferson and his gang had now made the national government
"to all intents and purposes, in virtue, spirit, and effect a democ¬
racy.”—Alas! "I once thought,” said Adams, "our Constitution was
quasi or mixed government,”—but alas! 33
"Quasi,” or better still "quasi-mixed”—for, given the American
people’s antipathy to monarchy after 1776, and given the non-
aristocratic nature (in a European sense) of the American upper
class of 1787, the Constitution at best, or worst, could only be
“quasi- mixed,” 34 since there were not "ingredients” available in
the United States to compose a genuine mixture in the classic
sense. So what the Fathers fashioned was a "quasi-mixed” Consti¬
tution that, given the "genius” of the American people, had a
^For convenience of reference, see Kenyon, The Antifederalists: Henry,
257; Lee, 205; and Grayson, 282-283.
^Madison, in Federalist 38, mocked (somewhat unfairly, under the cir¬
cumstances) the Anti-Federalists for exactly this disagreement and con¬
fusion. “This politician,” Madison wrote, “discovers in the constitution a
direct and irresistible tendency to monarchy [Henry]; that is equally sure
it will end in aristocracy [Lee]. Another is puzzled to say which of these
shapes it will ultimately assume, but sees clearly it must be one or other
of them [George Mason]; whilst a fourth [Grayson] . . . affirms that . . .
the weight on that side [i.e., monarchical/aristocratic] will not be sufficient
to keep it upright and firm against its opposite [i.e., democratic] tendencies.”
33 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 19 September 1806. J. A. Schutz and
D. Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin
Rush , 1805-1813 (San Marino, 1966), 66.
34 Quasi, [Latin = as if] seemingly, not real(ly), practical(ly), half-, almost.
Concise Oxford Dictionary (1963).
416 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
strong and inevitable tendency that “squinted” from the very be¬
ginning towards the national democracy that would finally develop
in the nineteenth century.
Shays’s Rebellion:
A Political Interpretation
J. R. POLE
A constitutional historian of Massachusetts, after bringing his
subject safely through the year 1780, might feel entitled to lay
down his pen and contemplate a work well done. Few were dis¬
posed to deny that the Constitution had been adopted with the
general consent of the governed or that the annually elected legis¬
lators conformed to the accepted notion of true representatives.
This impression of consent is made stronger by the tacit admis¬
sion of the rebels and malcontents who within a year had begun
to challenge the General Court by holding county conventions.
Their numerous demands for constitutional revision were not ad¬
vanced on the grounds that the ratification of the Constitution
had been a mere legal fiction; the justice of the Constitution was
impugned, but not its legality.
Within six years, longstanding discontent throughout much of
the Commonwealth had been fanned into organised riots, and
these in turn were raised, under the hesitant leadership of Captain
Darnel Shays, into a minor rebellion. The rebellion, a strangely dis¬
jointed, aimless affair, was crushed with slight loss. The State
Constitution not only emerged unshaken, but proved itself capable
of absorbing the impetus of discontent through the normal elective
system; at the ensuing elections, in April 1787, both Governor
James Bowdoin and a great majority of representatives lost their
seats. Within a few months, and particularly after the ratification
of the Federal Constitution, it was easy to believe that the whole
episode had been greatly over-rated; but before it was over it had
given the legislators and many substantial citizens, in Massachu¬
setts and in other states, a severe fright. If a truly republican
Repxinte d with permission from Political Representation in England and
the Origins of the American Republic (New York, St. Martin’s Press, Inc
Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1966), 227-244.
J. R. POLE 417
government could not hold the allegiance of the people, was the
American experiment destined to fail?
The question gave rise to some of the animus against ‘democ¬
racy’ expressed in the opening days of the Philadelphia Conven¬
tion. Shays’s Rebellion thus has a peculiar stature, much out of
proportion to its local character. The history of Europe is dotted
with minor peasant revolts, local, wild, and hopeless, which barely
attract the attention of the historian; Richelieu would have made
short work of Shays and his friends. But the rising of 1786 demon¬
strated with cruel violence that something had gone wrong with
the very institutions of representation which the people of the
Bay Colony had fought to defend and had agreed, by conference,
to maintain.
The grievances underlying the county conventions of 1786 and
the rebellion itself were repeatedly expounded at the time. They
may be summarised as economic distress, arising from the after-
math of war and from legislative policies, administered through,
and exacerbated by, the courts, the legal profession, and the
county officials. The burden of taxation to meet State debts was
compounded by the burden of private debt, and both were made
terrifying by the practice, or the threat, of the imprisonment of
debtors. The exorbitant expenses of court action often precluded
the poorer victims from seeking relief through litigation, even
when they had the better case. The petty tyrannies of sheriffs and
constables aroused bitter hatred.
No administration could entirely have averted the post-war eco¬
nomic crisis; but the form it took in Massachusetts was in large
measure a product of the policies of the General Court, a point
firmly grasped by the more articulate and better informed spokes¬
men of the protest movements.
As early as 1777, the General Court had initiated the hard-money
policy which it pursued, with much tacking and veering but with
unwavering purpose, right down to the crisis. By Acts of 1780 and
1781, all legal tender except gold and silver was abolished and
heavy taxes were imposed. Further measures in the following
years constantly proclaimed the dedication of successive legisla¬
tures to the principle of redeeming the State’s obligations to its
creditors at whatever cost to the overburdened and the poor. And
the poll tax, the most consistently used means of raising money,
being levied at a flat rate, had a most unequal operation. 1
a Oscar and Mary Handlin, “Revolutionary Economic Policy in Massachu¬
setts,” William and Mary Quarterly , IV (January, 1947), 3-26. Robert A.
East, “Massachusetts Conservatives in the Critical Period,” in Richard B.
Morris, ed.. The Era of the American Revolution (New York, 1939), 349—391;
418 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
It seemed by the early spring of 1786 that the hard struggles
of the Revolutionary War were to produce, for those who had
fought or endured them, nothing better than a dwindling lifetime
of debt, poverty, and even imprisonment. What made this intoler¬
able was that every officer of government was engaged as a matter
of duty in forcing home the exactions, inflicting the hardships.
The General Court was not unaware of the plight of the country.
Several towns instructed their representatives to procure remedies;
a graphic statement coming from the town of Palmer, in which
the removal of the General Court from Boston and the establish¬
ment of a "bank of paper money* were asked for—"Considering the
great desperateness of the Inhabitants of this commonwealth (and
the said Town of Palmer in particular) labours under by reason
of the great scarcity of surculating medeam*. 2 A few measures of
relief were passed in 1786, but in general the legislature did not
allow itself to be deflected from its main objectives either by the
evidence of economic crisis or by the fact that its own policies
were not working. As late as January, 1787, the import and excise
were renewed for three years and outstanding taxes ordered to
be collected "instantly*. 3
When every allowance has been made for the imperfections of
economic science and the humanity of the legislators, their course
on the one hand, and on the other the county conventions and the
outbreak of rebellion, raise questions which cannot be answered
by examining either economic statistics or the provisions of the
Constitution of 1780. The question is why a government consisting
solely of duly elected representatives should have pursued a policy
capable of alienating a large section of the people and driving the
remnant to despair and revolt; the question is also why, under a
representative government, the opposition should have been able
to find no means of attaining redress, both constitutional and
effective.
It is clear that, despite occasional hesitations and tackings, the
Assembly majority did pursue a definable policy. It is also clear
that this policy conformed in general to the objective of the lead-
Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence,
1954), 27-33, gives the best modem account of the court system, which is
vividly described in J. E. A. Smith, History of Pittsfield , Massachusetts
(Boston, 1869-1876), i, chap. 23.
2 House documents, no. 2234, 4 February 1786, Mass. Archives, Boston.
®House of Representatives Journal, 1786-7, vol. 7, 26 October 1786, Mass.
Archives; Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston,
1869—1922), May session 1786, chaps. 28, 29, 100, 113; January session
1787, chap. 29.
J. R. POLE 419
ing economic interest of the seaboard, and that it aroused heated
and widespread opposition.
The appointment of representatives was still determined under
the Act of May, 1776, 4 which will be recalled as the first to depart
from the pure principle of the corporate equality of the towns.
The larger numbers of members from the eastern towns were,
of course, within much easier reach of the capital than their col¬
leagues from the interior; their attendance could therefore always
be more regular. Their position also gave them the opportunity of
seeing each other and conferring in ways denied to the interior.
The county conventions so popular in the west, though hotly de¬
nounced as unconstitutional and subversive, may reasonably be
considered an organised counterpart to this unofficial but im¬
mensely useful seaboard advantage, which had originated so many
years before in the private caucus meetings in Boston.
The Speakers of the House continued to be Representatives
either of Boston or of other towns in the seaboard area, right
through the war and the Confederation period, with the single
and interesting exception of the critical year 1786—1787 when the
Speaker came from Shrewsbury in Worcester County. For most of
the same period the clerk of the House was also a Boston man.
The significance of this unauthorised system was understood
by the opposition. Few demands of the protest movement were
more insistently repeated than that for the removal of the General
Court out of Boston; and Massachusetts was a noteworthy excep¬
tion to the general tendency to remove the capital in a westerly
direction soon after the Revolution. This was frequently linked
with demands for a reform in the basis of representation and,
significantly, for the abolition of the Senate. 5 These three measures
were aimed at the machinery by which the seaboard kept its grip;
but it is doubtful whether they would ever have made a permanent
4 See Pole, Political Representation, p. 175.
'Resolutions of Worcester County Convention, 17 August 1786, Worcester
Magazine , 4th week, August 1786; Resolutions of Hampshire County Con¬
vention, Worcester Magazine, 3rd week, September 1786; town instructions
to Representatives, East Sudbury, May 1786, House Documents, no. 2305;
Watertown (which itself was adjacent to Boston and probably jealous of
its power), 29 May 1786, House Documents, no. 2281; Framingham, 22
September 1786, House Documents, no. 2279; Salisbury, 25 September 1786,
House Documents, no. 2278; Freetown, 14 May 1787, House Documents, no.
2698; Mansfield, 14 May 1787, House Documents, no. 2706; Dracut, 16-26
May 1787, House Documents, no. 2709; Wendover, 28 May 1787, House
Documents, no. 2708; Hardwick, 21 May 1787, House Documents, no. 2705;
Douglass, 28 May 1787, House Documents, no. 2702; Harvard, 28 May
1787, House Documents, no. 2696; Watertown (again), 28 May 1787, House
Documents, no. 2695, Mass. Archives.
420 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
difference without the aid of some standing political organisation.
Opposition demands for reform of the basis of representation
were usually general, and failed to specify precisely what reform
was desired. A clue seems to lie in a statement from the town of
Greenwich, suggesting (in reply to a letter from Boston town
meeting) that each town should send two members as of old,
under the Charter. 6 This letter included another point of greater
importance than seems to have been appreciated by many of the
protesters: that members of the General Court should be paid
from the state treasury since their service was to the whole com¬
munity. Had this been adopted in the Constitution, the chronic
non-representation of the poorer towns could have been remedied. 7
The mere existence of the Senate was a grievance. The conser¬
vatism of that body consisted partly in its tendency to reject re¬
forms emanating from the House, 8 partly in the mere presence of
a constitutional body based on property rather than persons. The
election of James Bowdoin as Governor in 1785, which took place
in the General Court owing to the lack of a popular majority for
any candidate, was carried with the aid of a senatorial majority
of commercial interests. 9 Economic distress and the policies of the
General Court had begun to make this principle seem more ob¬
jectionable than it had seemed in theory in 1780. The young John
Quincy Adams noted in 1787 that the Senate had several times
within the last eighteen months "saved the commonwealth from
complete anarchy, and perhaps from destruction’; but he observed
with earnest exaggeration that its hands were tied, that the "demo-
cratical branch’ of the government was "quite unrival’d’; and that
the people were too generally disposed to abolish the Senate as
"a useless body.’ 10
The actual distribution of senators on the basis of taxes paid,
rather than numbers, did not make a great difference. 11 Suffolk
*Worcester Magazine, 4th week, November 1786.
7 The provision in the Constitution was that the treasury should pay mem¬
bers their expenses but that their towns were then assessed for the amount
in taxes.
8 As late as October 1786 the Senate rejected a committee report for
simplifying legal procedure by requiring all original processes in civil cases
to be opened before Justices of the Peace, and that in cases of default
executions should issue without further delay. Essex Journal, 1 November
1786.
9 Richard B. Morris, ‘Insurrection in Massachusetts’, in Daniel Aaron, ed.,
America in Crisis (New York, 1952), 35.
10 Life in a New England Town; 1787 , 1788 (Boston, 1903), 120. Being
the Diary of John Quincy Adams.
“R. R. Palmer, The Age of ike Democratic Revolution , I, The Challenge
(Princeton, 1959), 226.
J. B. POLE 421
County, with Boston, had six senators instead of the four to which
it would have been entitled on a numerical basis; the central
and western counties were short by one or two senators; but it is
a mistake to assess representation in merely arithmetical terms.
All the senators, from whatever counties, were required to be men
of substance; and it is important to note that because they repre¬
sented counties, not towns, the senators were free from the restric¬
tions imposed by the prevalent and very strongly held doctrine of
the right of constituency instruction. 12 The Senate, indeed, re¬
tained its character long after the fires of Shays’s Rebellion had
burned out and its political cast was generally Federalist in the
1790s. 13
The better informed commentators who contributed essays on
economic policy to the newspapers showed much understanding
and often a fund of knowledge; but this was brought out only by
the crisis and the usual situation in the towns showed little change
since the days before the Revolution. Newspapers very seldom re¬
ported Assembly debates—the Hampshire Gazette was roused to
do so as late as November, 1786, and it did not become a habit. 14
The House itself did nothing to inform the people either of its
measures or the reason for them; even when it had acted to redress
grievances it failed to explain its actions. 15 A contributor sympa¬
thetic to the demonstrators pointed out that it would be well if
the General Court would inform their constituents more particu¬
larly of the state of public affairs; especially of the state’s part of
the national debt, the amount of the domestic debt, the annual
charge for the support of government, and the interest paid an¬
nually; the takings of the treasury by imposts, excise, licenses
and auctions, and taxes; and many other matters of political
economy which were later to become the currency of political
discussion. 16 Other glimpses of the curiously episodic state of in¬
formation about public affairs are caught from the instructions of
Douglass in May 1787, which remarked to the representative that
as he would have better information in that capacity than the
town he might make all reasonable alterations; a remark by the
chief justice that the representatives were better informed than
Baylor, Western Massachusetts , 140. Thus the senators were mucli less
tied by local opinion than the representatives, and occupied a position anal¬
ogous with that of the provincial councillors.
“Anson E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to 1800 (Prince¬
ton, 1909), 64 (hereafter referred to as Federalist Party').
14 Hampshire Gazette , 1 November 1786.
“Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 136.
“Trom a Friend . . .’, Hampshire Gazette, 11 October 1786.
422 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the towns, and a remark by another town that it ‘believed’ laws
had been passed contrary to the peace treaty—plainly admitting
to uncertainty about legislative history. 17
These deficiencies were admitted by the General Court to be
part of the reason for the prevailing dissatisfaction—or rather
they were proclaimed on the ground that better information would
have led to fairer appreciation of the efforts of the legislators. In
October 1786 a committee of both branches of the legislature
brought in a long report directly designed to answer recent com¬
plaints and to provide public information, and several measures
of redress were ordained; one of which, the introduction of a new
institution to take the place of the unpopular court of Common
Pleas, was later rejected by the Senate. 18 Soon afterwards, a formal
Address to the People by the General Court gave an account of
public revenues, spending, expectations from land sales, and the
state of the debt. This was necessary because, it was stated, dis¬
content had arisen largely from misinformation. 19
The great increase in the numbers of newspapers that had
taken place since before the Revolution might have been expected
to alter this situation for the better. Yet the Press remained a me¬
dium for episodic and often disconnected information. Acts of the
General Court were frequently reported, often being reproduced
in full; at the end of the session the papers sometimes regaled
their readers with a complete list of Acts passed. News from
Europe was given great prominence as often as it arrived by the
packet. But state and continental news came in for very incon¬
sistent treatment; and it is probable that much that was known in
the tavern was not thought worth reproducing in the Press. What,
in general, this Press system represented by contrast with the later
development of the Press, was a lack of any organised news¬
gathering service—something only vaguely felt by the printer-
editors as they solicited news and contributions.
In constitutional theory the towns were represented through
their right to instruct representatives. Through them the General
Court would possess all the information it needed for legislative
purposes. The difficulties experienced not only by Massachusetts
but by the American economy after the end of the war might have
been expected to provide the legislators with all the information
1T House Documents, nos. 2702, 2705, Mass. Archives; Hampshire Gazette,
29 November 1786.
“Hampshire Gazette , 18 October 1786; Essex Journal, 1 November 1786.
19 Worcester Magazine, November-December 1786; Hampshire Gazette, 13
December 1786.
J. R. POLE 423
they needed. Yet the months before the outbreak of violence in
Western Massachusetts present a curiously mixed picture. On 2
June 1786 Governor Bowdoin addressed the legislature on matters
requiring their attention. He remarked on the importance of paying
the revenue due to Congress and observed that appropriate tax
Acts would be necessary to raise the funds to meet the domestic
debt; he alluded also to the question of the Commonwealth’s
boundary with New York and the need to support Harvard College.
No one would have guessed from this speech that the western
counties seethed with discontented elements on the point of re¬
volt. 20
Why then, had not the afflicted areas themselves made better
use of their constitutional rights to instruct their representatives
and to apply for redress? If the instructions and petitions for relief
lying in the state archives are grouped together the cries of dis¬
tress sound insistent and impressive. None speaks clearer than
the plea of Ludlow:
We humbly Conceve that your honours are well acquainted with
the distresses of the people of this Commonwealth and are possessed
of Bowels of pitty and tenderness . 21
Not all these petitions agreed with each other. Most demanded
paper money, and a few denounced it: 22 but the curious thing is
that, from the period January to June 1786, the total number
surviving is 15 out of a total of instructions and petitions num¬
bering some 220. 23 The other factor of great significance is the
chronic non-representation of the smaller towns.
May 1786 began a session at which, in view of the growing dis¬
content, a large delegation might have been expected from the
western counties. In fact, of 314 towns entitled to representation
no fewer than 145 failed to elect a member. The three western
and central counties of Hampshire, Worcester, and Berkshire—
entitled between them to 130 representatives—could send only 67.
This figure probably represented a strenuous exertion, for it com-
*>Acts and Resolves, 1786-1787, 2 June 1786.
a 6 February 1786, House Documents, no. 2033, Mass. Archives,
^ewburyport asked for a stronger Congress and support for agriculture,
as well as drawing attention to unemployment in the shipbuilding industry.
Paper money was rejected as a bad remedy. Worcester Magazine, 3rd week,
June 1786.
^The serial numbers run from 2,009 to 2,231 for this period. But the
arrangement of the documents does not make this a conclusive guide. Be¬
tween late 1785 and early 1788 there appear to be some 5,000 petitions.
The number of these bearing reference to economic distress is surprisingly
smaH.
424 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
pared favourably with the percentage of the state as a whole. But
where Hampshire, Worcester, and Berkshire achieved a represen¬
tation of about 51 per cent against a state average of about 53, the
eastern counties of Suffolk, Essex, and Middlesex sent delegations
from 46 of their 78 towns—almost 60 per cent; and if the count
is confined to Essex and Suffolk, which between them concentrated
most of the seaboard population and mercantile property, the
contrast becomes still more striking: 29 out of 40 towns, or 72
per cent. 24 When all the unofficial advantages of the seaboard are
weighed in, and the lack of unity, previous consultation, or even
uniformity of interest of the interior counties is considered, the
political influence of the east becomes almost a tangible thing.
The basic reason for this non-representation was economic. The
town records show again and again that when the cost of being
assessed for the support of a member throughout the legislative
sessions was considered by a community, the gains to be had from
representation frequently did not seem worth the price. But the
very factors which made representation urgent also made it more
burdensome. The harder the times, the more inducement to the
towns to cut their costs. That any one town’s one or two represen¬
tatives would be able to make an effective impression on the gen¬
eral policies of the Court or on the condition of the Common¬
wealth always seemed improbable. It was easier to risk the fine for
non-representation and hope for the success of a plea of poverty.
The worse the crisis, the worse the representation of the state as
a whole at the seat of government; and this was a weakness that
applied particularly to the areas of greatest distress. The times
thus gave great force to the argument of Greenwich, that all rep¬
resentatives should be paid from the public chest—a view which
only some dozen towns had thought worth advancing in their
returns on the Constitution of 1780.
But the unwillingness of the dissatisfied towns to make an in¬
strument of reform of the General Court is not fully explained by
their poverty. It must be recognised that there occurred a danger¬
ous breakdown of confidence between the General Court and a
large body of citizens—a much larger body, to judge by the county
conventions, than eventually took part in the disturbances. Against
the strangely small number of petitions seeking redress from the
2 *Acts and Resolves, May 1786. The state average is computed with the
omission of Duke’s, Nantucket, and York, which for geographical reasons
were untypical. The low representation of Middlesex County, in which only
17 of 38 towns sent delegates, is evidence of the difficulties of the times.
It was not only in the west that these were true.
J. R. POLE 425
legislature, the conventions brought together and gave vent to an
impressive volume of indignation.
The link between the county conventions and the Shays dis¬
orders is obscure. The chief justice, William Cushing, charged
that every county to have held a convention also produced a re¬
bellion; the others had not. 25 Hostile critics heaped mountains of
abuse on the conventions, repeating incessantly that they were un¬
constitutional bodies led by desperate men; it was also alleged that
the leaders were old partisans of Britain, still acting under her
guidance; and it was occasionally said that they aimed at com¬
plete leve llin g and the seizure and division of property. Whether
or not the Convention leaders were possessed with the frenzy of
class hatred and the purpose of class war, such motives were freely
attributed to them by their enemies. 26
Much of the frenzy was worked up by the ‘conservatives’, who
convinced themselves that a new social revolution was in the
making, although there is no evidence of rebel plans against the
state government; it was on western ground that the rival forces
met, and hardly anyone on either side was hurt.
Not all conventions were radical. During the strange earlier
interlude of Berkshire’s semi-independence, the conservatives,
those who adhered to the central government and styled them¬
selves ‘friends of order’, held a convention in Stockbridge; 27 on
one occasion at least the legislature actually ordained a county
convention in Berkshire, to settle a dispute about the site of a new
county court house. 28 But it was of course perfectly true that the
Convention movement which revived even before the end of the
War and gathered momentum in the post-war crisis was a move¬
ment of protest.
The conventions were composed of delegates from the towns,
regularly elected in town meetings. It was open to each town to
decide whether or not to send a delegation, and those in which a
majority—or the leading citizens—opposed the whole practice
sometimes gave their reasons for declining. Thus Medford, re¬
fusing to attend the Worcester Convention of August 1786, de¬
clared it an unwarrantable attempt to take the public business out
of the hands of those (i.e. the General Court) to whom the Con-
25 Hampshire Gazette , 29 November 1786.
^These attacks were carried widely in the newspapers through the sum¬
mer and winter of 1786—1787.
^Theodore Sedgwick to James Sullivan, 16 May 1779. Sedgwick Papers,
Mass. Hist. Soc., Boston.
^In September 1784. Smith, History of Pittsfield , i. 429.
426 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
stitution had confided it. The proper procedure was to lay griev¬
ances before the General Court through instructions to representa¬
tives; but the call did not specify any grievances. The Convention,
this statement sharply added, was likely to create more grievances
by making parties and counteracting the proceedings of the Gen¬
eral Court. Medford believed the state debts to be debts of honour,
the price of victory in war. If the states repudiated it, the predic¬
tion of their enemies that the Americans were incapable of gov¬
erning themselves would be completely verified. 29
The biggest gain from the conventions may well have been that
by causing excitement and public debate they attracted attention
to the widespread nature of the grievances which called them
forth. But as a means of concerting opposition, they were not very
effective. The complaints listed in the resolves of the conventions
frequently reappeared in the instructions or petitions of the towns
which had sent delegations. But the repetition of these demands
made little impression on the General Court. As early as 1782, a
Convention in Worcester County demanded that the treasury make
out an annual account to be circulated among the towns, asked
for the removal of the General Court from Boston, and attacked
the problem of the jurisdiction of the civil courts. 30 The chief
justice, in his comprehensive indictment delivered in 1786, charged
the conventions, two or three years previously, with having drawn
up a list of nominees recommended for election to the House and
Senate; 31 and this is just the step that the conventions might be
expected to have taken in view of the need for an organised op¬
position, representing the discontented elements in the country.
This step was taken after the defeat of Shays. A Convention in
Worcester County then drew up and caused to be circulated a list
of proposed senatorial candidates—a fact made public by the
denunciation of the practice by a newspaper correspondent. It
appeared that a town meeting, called by the malcontents, had
written inviting other towns to send delegates to Patch’s tavern
in Worcester. Their ultimate dependence’, said the writer, ‘is on a
new General Court; and their greatest wishes are, to have men
of their own character and sentiments elected into the legislature,
that they may have a pardon enacted for all their treasonable prac¬
tices, and laws passed whereby they may be absolved from all
obligations to pay their debts, or be allowed to cheat their creditors
out of their dues, under sanction and colour of law.’ 32 Another
28 Worcester Magazine, last week, August 1786.
^Massachusetts Spy, 23 May 1782.
^Hampshire Gazette, 29 November 1786.
33 Worcester Magazine, 3rd week, March 1787.
J. It. POLE 427
letter in the same number, by a correspondent who had caught
wind of the scheme, hoped that the report was without founda¬
tion, asserting that every measure of that kind ‘to influence
Elections, is a violation of the constitution’. The news was con¬
firmed one week later, however, by a letter calling for the meeting,
and signed by the three committee members from the town of
Lunenburg. 33
The fate of this initiative is extremely interesting. Two letters
in the same issue, one from the town of Athol and one from an
individual, denounced the plan. The Constitution, said the Athol
reply, had wisely provided that senators be chosen by the free
suffrage of the people, ‘and anything that gives an undue influence
on the election of Senators is unconstitutional, and therefore
criminal . . .’ So hostile was the response of the county that the
chairman of the meeting at Patch’s actually published, in the same
issue, a notice stating that the lists being handed about had not
emanated from his meeting; no person for senator or any other
government office was agreed on; °We thought it best not to do
any business of that kind, and dispersed without doing any’.
This reaction was quite characteristic of the times. In Massa¬
chusetts, electioneering was still held in that sort of disfavour
which makes a practice impossible to admit in public. But in
other states this tradition was already crumbling and could not
last long.
The attack on the plan to prepare lists was not a mere trick
by the other side. The governing conception was that the election
was an occasion on which every freeholder voted his own mind;
and any attempt to influence him, by temptation or pressure, was
an attempt to corrupt the essential freedom of the election. Massa¬
chusetts, before the rise of political parties, was on the whole
singularly free from complaints of improper electoral tactics, and
the tickets which had so long been prepared by the Quakers in
Pennsylvania, the lavish treating in New York, and the gentle¬
manly canvassing, not by the candidates so much as by their hos¬
pitable friends in the South, would still, at this date, have seemed
grossly corrupt in New England, except perhaps in Rhode Island.
It was the general policy of the conventions to correspond with
each other on views, grievances, and remedies. Their meetings
became more frequent as the crisis developed. It is not surprising
that by early in the new year they should have begun to plan
for the forthcoming elections. Their whole procedure, indeed their
^Worcester Magazine , 4th week, March 1787.
428 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
existence, was disagreeably reminiscent, in the opinion of their
opponents, of the measures by which the province had been rallied
against the Crown. Then, at least from about 1774, there had been
a rising degree of unity; it could be argued that the Charter, under
attack by the British, was being defended by the people. But once
the Constitution of 1780 had gone into force, conventions chal¬
lenged the legitimacy of the government of the state. It was there¬
fore consistently argued by all their opponents that since the Con¬
stitution made no provision for them, but had provided adequate
means of representation, they lay outside the Constitution and
were illegal.
The charge of illegality can best be understood as an implied
counterassertion that the Constitution, having been established
by the consent of the governed, comprehended all possible modes
of legitimate political action. That instrument, as Chief Justice
Cushing observed, had parcelled out all the power to be exercised
under it; no delegated power remained to give to the county
conventions, unless it were to counteract the General Court and
compel or over-awe them. What then was to be done about real
grievances? The answer was plain: follow the ancient usage by
applying at regular town meetings to lawful representatives, either
by petition or instruction. The Constitution expressly protected
the right of instruction and the right of assembly. 34
This counsel, however, ignored the core of the dissidents’ prob¬
lem. In legislative divisions the instructed members might simply
be defeated. It was inherently unlikely that instructions could
overturn set legislative policies unless the opposing members had
had the opportunity of concerting their own measures. Here and
there a specific mistake or grievance might be corrected; but that
was not at all the same thing as reversing the entire direction of
economic policy. Yet the whole system under which the General
Court operated tended to preclude such previous consultation; the
country members came together from all over the state; and the
very steps by which some co-ordinated policy might have been
devised were denounced by all the agents and supporters of cen¬
tral government as unconstitutional. Within the formal constitu¬
tion of government was an informal but no less powerful system
by which the government was carried on. There was no lack of
opportunity for concerting policy by the men who were always
on the spot and who anyway held most of the strings of power
and influence. The county conventions must be understood as the
84 Hampshire Gazette , 29 November 1786.
J. E. POLE 429
natural—indeed, the normal—response of the discontented ele¬
ments to the effective exercise of power, through the control of
the ‘system’, by their opponents.
The county convention, springing directly from the towns, upon
particular occasions and derived from the popular resistance of
revolutionary times, seemed to its supporters to be nearer to the
people than did the General Court. The Court was of course made
up of representatives, no one denied that; but they were chosen on
a basis that was now found to be unsatisfactory, they were sub¬
ject to the check of a Senate chosen on a different basis and free
from the great control of instruction, and they were governed by
detailed rules of procedure not the least significant of which—as
some towns had noticed in 1780—was the rule that only sixty
members were required to make a quorum; this provision gave a
standing advantage to the nearby coastal and eastern towns. The
conventions seemed to claim to be an ‘anti-Courf in the same way
that the association which convened almost contemporaneously
in England seemed to its opponents to be an ‘anti-Parliamenf;
and they, too, denounced the body as unconstitutional.
The conventions, then, emerged as an old way of meeting new
problems. They reflected not so much the power as the lack of
effective instruments in the hands of a gravely discontented sec¬
tion of the people. It is this sense of lack which offers us a clearer
view of them—though one that was not available to them. The con¬
ventions were the only mode of collective protest, of the concert¬
ing of policies, which the dissidents could hit on before the rise of
the organized political party. Conventions disappeared when par¬
ties arose, until in due course the parties revived them for party
purposes; but after this they acquired a national, and lost their
local, character.
The upheaval of the spring elections of 1787 was all the more
remarkable. It was reflected in the sheer scale of participation by
the voters. In 1786, some 8,000 of them took part in the election
for Governor, being about 11 per cent of the adult white males
of the state; this, though slightly low, was not much below the
average for such elections since 1780. But 1787 produced a turn¬
out of over 24,000; about 32 per cent and nearly twice as high as
any before. 35 The Worcester Magazine reported the election of
sixteen new senators. The towns made an unprecedented effort to
return representatives. No fewer than 228 made elections, leaving
^See Pole, Political Representation , Appendix II, p. 542.
430 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
only 87 as absentees. (Next year an ebbing of this exertion was
already to be noticed, with 108 towns unrepresented.) In Hamp¬
shire 41 of 59 towns, in Berkshire 21 of 25, and in Worcester, by
a magnificent effort, every one of the 46 towns, returned repre¬
sentatives. Essex also achieved 100 per cent representation of its
18 towns, Suffolk 18 out of 22, and Middlesex 32 out of 38. An
extraordinary proportion of the representatives were new; no
fewer than 159 out of 253 were counted by the Worcester Mag -
azine. m
The social composition of the House of Representatives had
already begun to change by 1786, if the rank claimed by members
can be considered as a guide. The dignity of an ‘esquire’ still told
in such matters, but the ‘esquires’ had begun to yield place, par¬
ticularly to members bearing a military rank dating from the
Revolutionary War. 37 In policy, the results of the elections were felt
more in relief of distress than in a fundamental change of direc¬
tion. The former legislature had acted to suspend the collection of
debts in specie, and this Act was periodically renewed; and a
measure was passed for the relief of poor prisoners committed
for debt. Acts were also passed postponing the payment of taxes. 38
The new legislature also showed notable leniency towards the
Shaysites, who had been subjected to certain disabilities by the
preceding body. To those who had been disfranchised, the suffrage
franchise was restored in June 1787 after the disqualification had
been in effect for only four months and had applied only to the
election of April 1787. 39
These measures do not disclose a basic reorientation of economic
policy. The encouragement and protection of Massachusetts pro¬
duction and commerce, which was already legislative policy under
the Confederation, was continued; but the new legislature did
not initiate the paper money policy, or the establishment of a
"bank of paper money*, which were demanded by so many of the
stricken towns. 40 It should be recognised that even at the height
of discontent, the opposition to these measures was strong and
highly articulate, even in the west. The articulateness, the grasp
36 Acts and Resolves, May session 1787; May session 1788. "Worcester
Magazine, 1st week, June 1787.
S7 East, ‘Massachusetts Conservatives’, 358, 367.
88 Acts and Resolves, May session 1787, chap. 6; October session 1787,
chap. 20, chap. 29; February session 1788, chap. 53.
*°Acts and Resolves, 1787, chap. 21, approved 15 June 1787.
"A Bank of Massachusetts had been founded in 1784 (M. Jensen, The
New Nation [New York, 1950], 232) but it was an enterprise of the Boston
merchants and did not respond to the demands of the loose money interests.
J. R. POLE 431
of political language of the economic conservatives, especially
when combined with their social position, gave them an advantage
that could not easily be outswayed. In the election which turned
out the old General Court, even the insurgent county of Berkshire
returned two of the staunchest conservatives in America: Henry
Van Schaack and Theodore Sedgwick. The authority of men of
their social pre-eminence outweighed adverse political opinions.
When the new legislature met, the Philadelphia Convention had
already begun its sessions. In considering the course of state eco¬
nomic policy by that time, it is well to remember that the expec¬
tation of a new and stronger central government must have in¬
fluenced all deliberations. 41
Tpie seaboard party of merchant leadership, the creditor interest
which is generally—though somewhat mistakenly—described as
conservative’, was the party of Federalism. They supported the
new Constitution and they immediately appeared as friends of the
attitudes that would soon be identified with Hamilton. They no
longer felt, after the elections of 1787, that they could be sure of
controlling the state, but they took great comfort in the superior
power of the Federal Congress. ‘In my opinion’, wrote one of them
we never had a worse House of Reps—I thank God that we have
a federal Govt’ Another observed that the Massachusetts House
was said to be the worse that had ever sat, and added pungendy,
I desire to thank God, it is not in their power to make paper
money or to take many other disgraceful measures which we
should undoubtedly be obliged to submit to but for that sovereign
balm the Federal Constitution.’ 4 * Theodore Sedgwick, on his elec-
tion to the state legislature in 1787, received the congratulations
of Rufus King, who hoped there would be enough of his senti-
ments to check the madness of Democracy*. 43
^However, the General Court was still debating inodes of paying the state
the ^aioriSr h^a 11116 1789 i . thoug ^ Federalists had reason to doubt whether
me majority had any real intention of providing for it Thomas Dwi tn
Sedgwick, 19 June 1789, Sed^ick papers ^ to
Tulv 1?8Q S ^dgwick, 14 JuD * 1789 > Thomas Dwight to Sedgwick, 9
July 1789, Sedgwick Papers. As early as May 1788 Sedgwick, reportine on
S e ^,nfT^w eS1SlatU^e, ^sured his friend Van Schaack thafS least P t^^rds
of both Houses were federal*. Clearly the word had already been translated
its reference to the controversy over the Constitution, which had been
ratified by Massachusetts but had not yet been adopted to I description of
ms^lel^ck Papers.* 11 le ^ slature - to Van Schaack,
Se i gwic ^ 10 June 1787 > Sedgwick Papers. King, writing
he Was a member of Convention, remarked
ttoflar nfA pieclud ^ fr0 “ communicating, ‘even confidentially’, any par-
ticular of the proceedings. One may wonder how many politicians could be
rehed on to observe such a pledge in the conditions of modem democracy
43^ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The year 1780 established the Constitution of Massachusetts
but did not bring any change in the conduct of its politics. The
province had long been used to political factions, to the struggle
for prominence of energetic men, to the caucus and the manipula¬
tion of the town meeting; from about 1774, something like a
united front was brought into being against British tyranny, but
this front did not hold the government of the Bay Province to¬
gether. When, soon after the adoption of the new state Constitu¬
tion, the policy of the legislature began to provoke renewed discon¬
tent, the opposition resorted to the use of the county convention,
the only form of effective organisation it knew.
Though effective as an expression of grievance, it was less use¬
ful for securing redress. The persistent weakness of the opposition
was a phenomenon of some complexity. There were real difficul¬
ties about the working out of a satisfactory economic policy, and
these difficulties were multiplied for those who, being in a per¬
manent minority and not standing at the centre of information
and authority, were never in a position to formulate a clear policy
of their own. The merchant party did not handle the economic
affairs of the state with great success, and were ready to permit
modifications and to alleviate undue hardships when the need
was pointed out to them: but they did in effect work as a political
party. Their strategic position, their opportunities of mutual con¬
sultation, and the quorum rule in the House of Representatives
gave them all the advantages of a party without the distasteful
formality of organisation; nor were they required to face the ex¬
tremely arduous task, which gave much trouble to later party
organisers, of keeping the machinery of a party in existence be¬
tween elections.
The organisation of opposition through committees of corres¬
pondence had worked splendidly during the Revolution because
of the essential unity of purpose between the towns and the pro¬
vincial Congress, which soon became the Assembly of the state;
but it was a different matter when the opposition was to the
policy of the state’s own legislature. Americans politicians had
not learned to differentiate between opposing the policy of the
majority and opposing the Constitution itself; it was a distinction
which until very lately had been delicate in Britain, where the idea
of a ‘formed’ opposition was officially held to imply disloyalty to
the Crown. Supporters of majority policies could easily denounce
the efforts of their opponents as unconstitutional—as ‘disloyal’,
in the American sense.
What the opposition needed, instead of a series of county con-
J. R. POLE 433
ventions, was a state-wide political party. The need was urgent, a
fact which can be seen very clearly in retrospect; but the idea was
inchoate, and when it began to take shape it reeked of those signs
of conspiracy, of dissent from the agreed will of the sovereign
people, of the attempt to interfere with the elemental freedom of
the choice made by the voter on the spot at the time of the elec¬
tion, which the managers of the system always found so easy to
discern and denounce.
The amount of public information carried by the newspapers
increased through the period; and during the Shays troubles they
fairly groaned with political and economic argument; that none of
them was sympathetic to the malcontents was a factor which
diminished their utility as organs of a possible organised opposi¬
tion; but some of them gave both sides a hearing, and they could
always be used to announce meetings and to sound opinion.
After the recent excitements, and the struggle over the adoption
of the Constitution, the townsmen watched their representatives
with keen and suspicious attention. A particularly bad impression
was created by the Act of the new Congress establishing the
salaries of members. The husbandmen of Massachusetts were not
prepared to acquiesce in letting politics become a remunerative
career; and the Act caused great anxiety to the Federalists, who
had the job of explaining and justifying the Congress to the
electorate. The idea of making money out of the public at this
time’, wrote Van Schaack, from Pittsfield, to Sedgwick, now in
Congress, ought to be expunged/ If the report of the committee
on this matter were adopted it would lessen the confidence of ‘a
considerable number of the yeomanry of the country'. 44 The frugal
people of New England were not impressed by the explanation
that the Congress had to pay regard to the habits of Southern
gentlemen; gentlemen and yeomen were unanimously against it. 45
A year later the defeat of a respected member was attributed to his
support of this measure. 46
Nothing could more persuasively demonstrate the system of
personal influence by which the Federalists maintained their lead¬
ership than the correspondence between Sedgwick, the leading
Federalist of Western Massachusetts and one of the leaders in
Congress, and his close associates at home. It was as a result of a
militia matter that Van Schaack was able to co nfir m the accuracy
of his impressions about the remuneration of federal representa-
M Van Schaack to Sedgwick, 5 July 1789, Sedgwick Papers.
45 Van Schaack to Sedgwick, 26 July 1789, Sedgwick Papers.
Thomas Dwight to Theodore Sedgwick, 13 July 1790, Sedgwick Papers.
434 reinterpretation of the American revolution
tives and officers of government; while Sedgwick was urged to
tell other members of Congress to ‘take every opportunity to write
to their country friends' about every beneficial measure; no pains
should be spared to make a favourable impression among the
great body of people. 47
The language of this correspondence is that of a network of
distinguished men who, understanding each other well, expected
to be able through the exercise of traditional influence to lead the
yeomanry. These were the gentlemen, and they knew it; the yeo¬
manry were expected to follow. To maintain their leadership by
this time required hard work: it meant making sure that people
attended town meetings, and even making sure that votes, once
cast, were returned to the secretary of state's office within the
proper time.
T am persuaded by recent experience', wrote another of Sedg¬
wick's friends, ‘that we can do infinitely more by private Letters
than by News paper publications'. 48
This was the old system, and it was not played out yet. But in
order to make it work, the Federalists would soon have to admit
the necessity for a more permanent and even a more professional
form of organisation; and it would not be long before they pro¬
claimed—or admitted—themselves to be a political party.
PapIrT Schaack t0 Sed S wick ’ 19 Juiy 1789, 7 February 1790, Sedgwick
^S. Henshaw to Sedgwick, 15 April 1789, Sedgwick Papers.
THE
TRIUMPH
OF HOPE
FROM PROBLEMS TO
SOLUTIONS
Given the political rivalries, conflicting material inter¬
ests, and divergent social outlooks within the United
States, as well as the frailties of human nature and the
long and dismal history of failure of experiments in
republican government, the problems that confronted
the men who met in Philadelphia in the summer of
1787 would seem to have been almost insurmountable.
How they diagnosed those problems, the practical politi¬
cal considerations and psychological and philosophical
imperatives that drove and emboldened them to try to
solve them, and the solutions they reached are described
in the three selections below. The first selection empha¬
sizes the concrete political problems with which the
Framers had to grapple, their nationalistic orientation,
their skill at compromise and improvisation, their com¬
mitment to democratic political procedures, and the
"patchwork” quality of the resulting Constitution. The
second selection analyzes the Framers’ pessimistic con¬
ception of man and the assumptions about the function,
nature, and form of government that flowed from it; it
also assesses the importance of that conception and
those assumptions in shaping the work of the Conven¬
tion. The third selection discusses James Madison’s solu¬
tion to the historic problems of republican governments
and traces that solution to Madison’s reading of the Scot¬
tish philosopher, David Hume. Though neither of the last
two selections in any way suggests that the practical and
tangible considerations emphasized by the first selection
did not play a major role in determining the behavior
of the Framers, they both call attention to the devotion
of many of the Framers to the ideal of making a genu¬
inely scientific attempt to discover the "true” principles
of republican government and to devise ways to put
these principles into practical operation.
436
JOHN P. ROCHE
437
John p. roche (b. 1923) is a member of the Politics
Department at Brandeis University and currently special
assistant to President lyndon b. Johnson; Arthur o.
love joy (1873—1963), pioneer in the study of the his¬
tory of ideas, was a member of the Department of
Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University.
The Founding Fathers:
A Reform Caucus in Action
JOHN P. ROCHE
Over the last century and a half, the work of the Constitutional
Convention and the motives of the Founding Fathers have been
analyzed under a number of different ideological auspices. To one
generation of historians, the hand of God was moving in the as¬
sembly ; under a later dispensation, the dialectic (at various levels
of philosophical sophistication) replaced the Deity: "relationships
of production” moved into the niche previously reserved for Love
of Country. Thus in counterpoint to the Zeitgeist, the Framers
have undergone miraculous metamorphoses: at one time ac¬
claimed as liberals and bold social engineers, today they appear
in the guise of sound Burkean conservatives, men who in our time
would subscribe to Fortune, look to Walter Lippmann for political
theory, and chuckle patronizingly at the antics of Barry Gold-
water. The implicit assumption is that if James Madison were
among us, he would be President of the Ford Foundation, while
Alexander Hamilton would chair the Committee for Economic
Development.
The Fathers” have thus been admitted to our best circles; the
revolutionary ferocity which confiscated all Tory property in reach
and populated New Brunswick with outlaws has been converted
by the "Miltown School” of American historians into a benign
dedication to "consensus” and "prescriptive rights.” The Daughters
of the American Revolution have, through the ministrations of
Professors Boorstin, Hartz, and Rossiter, at last found ancestors
t P er *nission from The American Political Science Review
LV (December, 1961), 799-816.
438 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
worthy of their descendants. It is not my purpose here to argue
that the “Fathers” were, in fact, radical revolutionaries; that prop¬
osition has been brilliantly demonstrated by Robert R. Palmer in
his Age of the Democratic Revolution. My concern is with the
further position that not only were they revolutionaries, but also
they were democrats. Indeed, in my view, there is one fundamental
truth about the Founding Fathers that every generation of Zeit-
geisters has done its best to obscure: they were first and foremost
superb democratic politicians. I suspect that in a contemporary
setting, James Madison would be speaker of the House of Repre¬
sentatives and Hamilton would be the eminence grise dominating
(pace Theodore Sorenson or Sherman Adams) the Executive Office
of the President. They were, with their colleagues, political men —
not metaphysicians, disembodied conservatives or Agents of His¬
tory—and as recent research into the nature of American politics
in the 1780s confirms, 1 they were committed (perhaps willy-nilly)
to working within the democratic framework, within a universe of
public approval. Charles Beard and the filiopietists to the con¬
trary notwithstanding, the Philadelphia Convention was not a
College of Cardinals or a council of Platonic guardians working
within a manipulative, pre-democratic framework; it was a nation¬
alist reform caucus which had to operate with great delicacy and
skill in a political cosmos full of enemies to achieve the one
definitive goal—popular approbation.
Perhaps the time has come, to borrow Walton Hamilton’s fine
phrase, to raise the Framers from immortality to mortality, to
give them credit for their magnificent demonstration of the art
of democratic politics. The point must be reemphasized; they
made history and did it within the limits of consensus. There was
nothing inevitable about the future in 1787; the Zeitgeist, that
fine Hegelian technique of begging causal questions, could only
be discerned in retrospect. What they did was to hammer out a
pragmatic compromise which would both bolster the “National
interest” and be acceptable to the people. What inspiration they
got came from their collective experience as professional politicians
1 The view that the light to vote in the states was severely circumscribed
by property qualifications has been thoroughly discredited in recent years.
See Chilton'vWilliainson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy,
1760-1860 (Princeton, 1960). The contemporary position is that John
Dickinson actually knew what he was talking about when he argued that
there would be little opposition to vesting the right of suffrage in free¬
holders since ‘The great mass of our Citizens is composed at th is time of
freeholders, and will be pleased with it.” Max Farrand, Records of the Fed¬
eral Convention, Vol. 2 (New Haven, 1911), p. 202. (Henceforth cited as
Farrand .)
JOHN P. ROCHE 439
in a democratic society. As John Dickinson put it to his fellow
delegates on August 13, “Experience must be our guide. Reason
may mislead us.”
In this context, let us examine the problems they confronted
and the solutions they evolved. The Convention has been described
picturesquely as a counter-revolutionary junta and the Constitu¬
tion as a coup d'etat, 2 but this has been accomplished by with¬
drawing the whole history of the movement for constitutional re¬
form from its true context. No doubt the goals of the constitutional
elite were “subversive” to the existing political order, but it is over¬
looked that their subversion could only have succeeded if the
people of the United States endorsed it by regularized procedures.
Indubitably they were “plotting” to establish a much stronger cen¬
tral government than existed under the Articles, but only in the
sense in which one could argue equally well that John F. Kennedy
was, from 1956 to 1960, “plotting” to become President. In short,
on the fundamental procedural level, the Constitutionalists had
to work according to the prevailing rules of the game. Whether
they liked it or not is a topic for spiritualists—and is irrelevant:
one may be quite certain that had Washington agreed to play
the de Gaulle (as the Cincinnati once urged), Hamilton would
willingly have held his horse, but such fertile speculation in no
way alters the actual context in which events took place.
I
When the Constitutionalists went forth to subvert the Confed¬
eration, they utilized the mechanisms of political legitimacy. And
the roadblocks which confronted them were formidable. At the
same time, they were endowed with certain potent political assets.
The history of the United States from 1786 to 1790 was largely
one of a masterful employment of political expertise by the Con¬
stitutionalists as against bumbling, erratic behavior by the op¬
ponents of reform. Effectively, the Constitutionalists had to induce
^he classic statement of the coup d'etat theory is, of course, Charles A.
Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the United States (New York, 1913),
and this theme was echoed by Vernon L. Parrington, Merrill Jensen and
others in “populist” historiographical tradition. For a sharp critique of this
thesis see Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution (Princeton,
1956). See also Forrest McDonald, We the People (Chicago, 1958); the
trailblazing work in this genre was Douglas Adair, “The Tenth Federalist
Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. VIII (1951), up.
48-67.
44° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the states, by democratic techniques of coercion, to emasculate
themselves. To be specific, if New York had refused to join the
new Union, the project was doomed; yet before New York was
safely in, the reluctant state legislature had sua sponte to take the
following steps: (1) agree to send delegates to the Philadelphia
Convention; (2) provide maintenance for these delegates (these
were distinct stages: New Hampshire was early in na min g dele¬
gates, but did not provide for their maintenance until July); (3)
set up the special ad hoc convention to decide on ratification; and
(4) concede to the decision of the ad hoc convention that New
York should participate. New York admittedly was a tricky state,
with a strong interest in a status quo which permitted her to ex¬
ploit New Jersey and Connecticut, but the same legal hurdles
existed in every state. And at the risk of becoming boring, it must
be reiterated that the only weapon in the Constitutionalist arsenal
was an effective mobilization of public opinion.
The group which undertook this struggle was an interesting
amalgam of a few dedicated nationalists with the self-interested
spokesmen of various parochial bailiwicks. The Georgians, for
example, wanted a strong central authority to provide military
protection for their huge, underpopulated state against the Creek
Confederacy; Jerseymen and Connecticuters wanted to escape
from economic bondage to New York; the Virginians hoped to
establish a system which would give that great state its rightful
place in the councils of the republic. The dominant figures in the
politics of these states therefore cooperated in the call for the
Convention. 3 In other states, the thrust towards national reform
was taken up by opposition groups who added the "national in¬
terest” to their weapons system; in Pennsylvania, for instance, the
group fighting to revise the Constitution of 1776 came out four¬
square behind the Constitutionalists, and in New York, Hamilton
and the Schuyler ambiance took the same tack against George
Clinton. 4 There was, of course, a large element of personality in
the affair: there is reason to suspect that Patrick Henry’s opposi-
tion to the Convention and the Constitution was founded on his
3 A basic volume, which, like other works by Warren, provides evidence
with which one can evaluate the author’s own opinions, is Charles Warren,
The Making of the Constitution (Boston, 1928). The best brief summary
of the forces behind the movement for centralization is ch. 1 of Warren
(as it will be cited hereafter).
4 On Pennsylvania see Robert L. Brunhouse, Counter-Revolution in Penn¬
sylvania (Harrisburg, 1942) and Charles P. Smith, James Wilson (Chapel
Hill, 1956), ch. 15; for New York, which needs the same sort of micro¬
analysis Pennsylvania has received, the best study is E. Wilder Spaulding,
New York in the Critical Period , 1783-1789 (New York, 1932).
JOHN P. ROCHE 44I
conviction that Jefferson was behind both, and a close study of
local politics elsewhere would surely reveal that others supported
the Constitution for the simple (and politically quite sufficient)
reason that the "wrong” people were against it.
To say this is not to suggest that the Constitution rested on a
foundation of impure or base motives. It is rather to argue that in
politics there are no immaculate conceptions, and that in the
drive for a stronger general government, motives of all sorts
played a part. Few men in the history of mankind have espoused
a view of the "common good” or "public interest” that militated
against their private status; even Plato with all his reverence for
disembodied reason managed to put philosophers on top of the
pile. Thus it is not surprising that a number of diversified private
interests joined to push the nationalist public interest; what would
have been surprising was the absence of such a pragmatic united
front. And the fact remains that, however motivated, these men
did demonstrate a willingness to compromise their parochial in¬
terests in behalf of an ideal which took shape before their eyes
and under their ministrations.
As Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have suggested in a per¬
ceptive essay, 6 what distinguished the leaders of the Constitution¬
alist caucus from their enemies was a "Continental” approach to
political, economic and military issues. To the extent that they
shared an institutional base of operations, it was the Continental
Congress (thirty-nine of the delegates to the Federal Convention
had served in Congress 6 ), and this was hardly a locale which
inspired respect for the state governments. Robert de Jouvenal ob¬
served French politics half a century ago and noted that a revo¬
lutionary Deputy had had more in common with a non-revolution-
ary Deputy than he had with a revolutionary non-Deputy; 7 simi¬
larly one can surmise that membership in the Congress under
the Articles of Confederation worked to establish a continental
frame of reference, that a Congressman from Pennsylvania and
one from North Carolina would share a universe of discourse
which provided them with a conceptual common denominator
vis a vis their respective state legislatures. This was particularly
true with respect to external affairs: the average state legislator
was probably about as concerned with foreign policy then as he is
today, but Congressmen were constantly forced to take the broad
8 Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men
of the Kevolution,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 76 (1961), p. 181.
Q Warren, p. 55.
7 In La Rgpublique des Camarades (Paris, 1914).
442 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
view of American prestige, were compelled to listen to the reports
of Secretary John Jay and to the dispatches and pleas from their
frustrated envoys in Britain, France and Spain. 8 From considera¬
tions such as these, a "Continental” ideology developed which
seems to have demanded a revision of our domestic institutions
primarily on the ground that only by invigorating our general gov¬
ernment could we assume our rightful place in the international
arena. Indeed, an argument with great force—particularly since
Washington was its incarnation—urged that our very survival in
the Hobbesian jungle of world politics depended upon a reordering
and strengthening of our national sovereignty. 9
Note that I am not endorsing the "Critical Period” thesis; on
the contrary, Merrill Jensen seems to me quite sound in his view
that for most Americans, engaged as they were in self-sustaining
agriculture, the "Critical Period” was not particularly critical. 10
hi fact, the great achievement of the Constitutionalists was their
ultimate success in convincing the elected representatives of a
majority of the white male population that change was imperative.
A small group of political leaders with a Continental vision and
essentially a consciousness of the United States’ international im¬
potence , provided the matrix of the movement. To their standard
other leaders rallied with their own parallel ambitions. Their great
assets were (1) the presence in their caucus of the one authentic
American "father figure,” George Washington, whose prestige was
enormous; 11 (2) the energy and talent of their leadership (in
which one must include the towering intellectuals of the time,
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, despite their absence abroad),
and their communications "network,” which was far superior to
anything on the opposition side; 12 (3) the preemptive skill which
made "their” issue The Issue and kept the locally oriented opposi¬
te Frank Monaghan, John Jay (New York, 1935), ch. 13.
fl “[T]he situation of the general government, if it can be called a govern¬
ment, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every
blast. In a word, it is at an end; and, unless a remedy is soon applied,
anarchy and confusion will inevitably ensue.” Washington to Jefferson, May
3°, 1787, Farrand, III, 31. See also Irving Brant, James Madison , The Na¬
tionalist (New York, 1948), ch. 25.
10 Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (New York, 1950). Interestingly enough,
Prof. Jensen virtually ignores international relations in his laudatory treat¬
ment of the government under the Articles of Confederation.
u The story of James Madison’s cultivation of Washington is told bv
Brant, op. ci£., pp. 394-397.
^he “message center” being the Congress; nineteen members of Con¬
gress were simultaneously delegates to the Convention. One gets a sense of
this coordination of effort from Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton ,
Youth to Maturity (New York, 1957), ch. 22.
JOHN E. ROCHE 443
tion permanently on the defensive; and (4) the subjective consid¬
eration that these men were spokesmen of a new and compelling
credo: American nationalism, that ill-defined but nonetheless
potent sense of collective purpose that emerged from the American
Revolution.
Despite great institutional handicaps, the Constitutionalists
managed in the mid-1780s to mount an offensive which gained
momentum as years went by. Their greatest problem was lethargy,
and paradoxically, the number of barriers in their path may have
proved an advantage in the long run. Beginning with the initial
battle to get the Constitutional Convention called and delegates
appointed, they could never relax, never let up the pressure. In
practical terms, this meant that the local "organizations” created
by the Constitutionalists were perpetually in movement building
up their cadres for the next fight. (The word organization has to
be used with great caution: a political organization in the United
States—as in contemporary England 13 —generally consisted of a
magnate and his following, or a coalition of magnates. This did
not necessarily mean that it was "undemocratic” or "aristocratic,”
in the Aristotelian sense of the word: while a few magnates such
as the Livingstons could draft their followings, most exercised their
leadership without coercion on the basis of popular endorsement.
The absence of organized opposition did not imply the impossibility
of competition any more than low public participation in elections
necessarily indicated an undemocratic suffrage.)
The Constitutionalists got the jump on the "opposition” (a col¬
lective noun: oppositions would be more correct) at the outset
with the demand for a Convention. Their opponents were caught
in an old political trap: they were not being asked to approve any
specific program of reform, but only to endorse a meeting to dis¬
cuss and recommend needed reforms. If they took a hard line at
the first stage, they were put in the position of glorifying the
status quo and of denying the need for any changes. Moreover,
the Constitutionalists could go to the people with a persuasive
argument for "fair play”—"How can you condemn reform before
you know precisely what is involved?” Since the state legislatures
obviously would have the final say on any proposals that might
emerge from the Convention, the Constitutionalists were merely
reasonable men asking for a chance. Besides, since they did not
make any concrete proposals at that stage, they were in a position
13 See Six Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of
George III , 2d ed. (New York, 1957); England in the Age of the American
Revolution (London, 1930).
444 reinterpretation of the American revolution
to capitalize on every sort of generalized discontent with the
Confederation.
Perhaps because of their poor intelligence system, perhaps be¬
cause of over-confidence generated by the failure of all previous
efforts to alter the Articles, 14 the opposition awoke too late to the
dangers that confronted them in 1787. Not only did the Constitu¬
tionalists manage to get every state but Rhode Island (where poli¬
tics was ^enlivened by a party system reminiscent of the “Blues”
and the “Greens” in the Byzantine Empire) 15 to appoint delegates
to Philadelphia, but when the results were in, it appeared that
they dominated the delegations. Given the apathy of the opposi¬
tion, this was a natural phenomenon: in an ideologically non¬
polarized political atmosphere those who get appointed to a special
committee are likely to be the men who supported the movement
for its creation. Even George Clinton, who seems to have been the
first opposition leader to awake to the possibility of trouble, could
not prevent the New York legislature from appointing Alexander
Hamilton—though he did have the foresight to send two of his
henchmen to dominate the delegation. Incidentally, much has
been made of the fact that the delegates to Philadelphia were not
elected by the people; some have adduced this fact as evidence of
the “undemocratic” character of the gathering. But put in the con¬
text of the time, this argument is wholly specious: the central gov¬
ernment under the Articles was considered a creature of the com¬
ponent states and in all the states but Rhode Island, Connecticut
and New Hampshire, members of the national Congress were
chosen by the state legislatures. This was not a consequence of
elitism or fear of the mob; it was a logical extension of states’-
rights doctrine to guarantee that the national institution did not
end-run the state legislatures and make direct contact with the
people. 16
^The Annapolis Convention, called for the previous year, turned into a
snambles: only five states sent commissioners, only three states were legally
represented and the instructions to delegates named varied quite widely
irom state to state. Clinton and others of his persuasion may have thought
tins disaster would put an end to the drive for reform. See Mitchell, op.
eit., pp. 362-367; Brant, op. cit., pp. 375-387. *
“ S f. e Hamilton M. Bishop, Why Rhode Island Opposed the Federal Con¬
stitution (Providence, 1950) for a careful analysis of the labyrinthine po-
° f l6land - For background see David S. Lovejoy, Rhode
1S vrn. Folltlcs J lnd the American Revolution (Providence, 1958).
“The terms "radical” and “conservative” have been bandied about a good
deal in connection with the Constitution. This usage is nonsense if it is
employed to distinguish between two economic “classes”— e.g., radical debt¬
ors versus conservative creditors, radical farmers versus conservative capi¬
talists, etc.—because there was no polarization along this line of division;
JOHN R. ROCHE 445
II
With delegations safely named, the focus shifted to Philadelphia.
While waiting for a quorum to assemble, James Madison got
busy and drafted the so-called Randolph or Virginia Plan with the
aid of the Virginia delegation. This was a political master-stroke.
Its consequence was that once business got under way, the frame¬
work of discussion was established on Madison’s terms. There
was no interminable argument over agenda; instead the delegates
took the Virginia Resolutions—“just for purposes of discussion”—
as their point of departure. And along with Madison’s proposals,
many of which were buried in the course of the summer, went his
major premise: a new start on a Constitution rather than piece¬
meal amendment. This was not necessarily revolutionary—a little
exegesis could demonstrate that a new Constitution might be
formulated as “amendments” to the Articles of Confederation—
but Madison’s proposal that this "lump sum” amendment go into
effect after approval by nine states (the Articles required unani¬
mous state approval for any amendment) was thoroughly sub¬
versive. 17
Standard treatments of the Convention divide the delegates into
“nationalists” and “states’-righters” with various improvised shad¬
ings (“moderate nationalists,” etc.), but these are a posteriori
categories which obfuscate more than they clarify. What is striking
to one who analyzes the Convention as a case-study in democratic
politics is the lack of clear-cut ideological divisions in the Con¬
vention. Indeed, I submit that the evidence—Madison’s Notes, the
correspondence of the delegates, and debates on ratification—in¬
dicates that this was a remarkably homogeneous body on the
ideological level. Yates and Lansing, Clinton’s two chaperones for
Hamilton, left in disgust on July 10. (Is there anything more
the same types of people turned up on both sides. And many were hard to
place in these terms: does one treat Robert Morris as a debtor or a creditor?
or James Wilson? See Brown, op. cii., passim. The one line of division
that holds up is between those deeply attached to states’ rights and those
who felt that the Confederation was bankrupt. Thus, curiously, some of
the most narrow-minded, parochial spokesmen of the time have earned the
designation “radical” while those most willing to experiment and alter
the status quo have been dubbed “conservative”! See Cecelia Kenyon, “Men
of Little Faith,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 12 (1955), p. 3.
17 Yet, there was little objection to this crucial modification from any
quarter—there almost seems to have been a gentlemen’s agreement that
Rhode Island’s liberum veto had to be destroyed.
44^ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tedious than sitting through endless disputes on matters one
deems fundamentally misconceived? It takes an iron will to spend
a hot summer as an ideological agent provocateur.') Luther Martin,
Maryland’s bibulous narcissist, left on September 4 in a huff when
he discovered that others did not share his self-esteem; others
went home for personal reasons. But the hard core of delegates
accepted a grinding regimen throughout the attrition of a Phila¬
delphia summer precisely because they shared the Constitution¬
alist goal.
Basic differences of opinion emerged, of course, but these were
not ideological; they were structural. If the so-called “states’-
rights” group had not accepted the fundamental purposes of the
Convention, they could simply have pulled out and by doing so
have aborted the whole enterprise. Instead of bolting, they re¬
turned day after day to argue and to compromise. An interesting
symbol of this basic homogeneity was the initial agreement on
secrecy: these professional politicians did not want to become pris¬
oners of publicity; they wanted to retain that freedom of maneuver
which is only possible when men are not forced to take public
stands in the preliminary stages of negotiation. 18 There was no
legal means of binding the tongues of the delegates: at any stage
in the game a delegate with basic principled objections to the
emerging project could have taken the stump (as Luther Martin
did after his exit) and denounced the convention to the skies. Yet
Madison did not even inform Thomas Jefferson in Paris of the
course of the deliberations 19 and available correspondence indi¬
cates that the delegates generally observed the injunction. Secrecy
is certainly uncharacteristic of any assembly marked by strong
ideological polarization. This was noted at the time: the New
York Daily Advertiser , August 14, 1787, commented that the
. . profound secrecy hitherto observed by the convention [we
consider] a happy omen, as it demonstrates that the spirit of party
on any great and essential point cannot have arisen to any
height.” 20
Commentators on the Constitution who have read The Federalist
in lieu of reading the actual debates have credited the Fathers with
“See Mason’s letter to his son. May 27, 1787, in which he endorsed
secrecy as "a proper precaution to prevent mistakes and misrepresentation
until the business shall have been completed, when the whole may have
a very different complexion from that in which the several crude and
indigested parts might in their first shape appear if submitted to the public
eye.” Farr and, HI, 28.
“See Madison to Jefferson, June 6, 1787, Farr and. III, 35.
“Cited in Warren , p. 138.
JOHN P. ROCHE 447
the invention of a sublime concept called “Federalism.” 21 Unfor¬
tunately The Federalist is probative evidence for only one proposi¬
tion: that Hamilton and Madison were inspired propagandists with
a genius for retrospective symmetry. Federalism, as the theory is
generally defined, was an improvisation which was later promoted
into a political theory. Experts on “federalism” should take to heart
the advice of David Hume, who warned in his Of the Rise and
Progress of the Arts and Sciences that . . there is no subject in
which we must proceed with more caution than in [history], lest
we assign causes which never existed and reduce what is merely
contingent to stable and universal principles.” In any event, the
final balance in the Constitution between the states and the nation
must have come as a great disappointment to Madison, while
Hamilton's unitary views are too well known to need elucidation.
It is indeed astonishing how those who have glibly designated
James Madison the “father” of Federalism have overlooked the
solid body of fact which indicates that he shared Hamilton's quest
for a unitary central government. To be specific, they have avoided
examining the clear import of the Madison-Virginia Plan, 22 and
have disregarded Madison's dogged inch-by-inch retreat from the
bastions of centralization. The Virginia Plan envisioned a unitary
national government effectively freed from and dominant over
the states. The lower house of the national legislature was to be
elected directly by the people of the states with membership pro¬
portional to population. The upper house was to be selected by the
lower and the two chambers would elect the executive and choose
the judges. The national government would be thus cut completely
loose from the states. 23
a See, e.g., Gottfried Dietze, The Federalist, A Classic on Federalism and
Free Government (Baltimore, 1960); Richard Hofstadter, The American
Political Tradition (New York, 1948); and John P. Roche, “American Lib¬
erty,” in M. Konvitz and C. Rossiter, eds.. Aspects of Liberty (Ithaca, 1958).
hold it for a fundamental point, that an individual independence of
the states is utterly irreconcilable with the idea of an aggregate sovereignty,”
Madison to Randolph, cited in Brant, op. cit p. 416.
^The Randolph Plan was presented on May 29, see Farr and, I, 18—23;
the state legislatures retained only the power to nominate candidates for
the upper chamber. Madison’s view of the appropriate position of the states
emerged even more strikingly in Yates’ record of his speech on June 29:
“Some contend that states are sovereign when in fact they are only political
societies. There is a gradation of power in all societies, from the lowest
corporation to the highest sovereign. The states never possessed the essen¬
tial rights of sovereignty. . . . The states, at present, are only great corpora¬
tions, having the power of making by-laws, and these are effectual only
if they are not contradictory to the general confederation. The states ought
to be placed under the control of the general government—at least as much
so as they formerly were under the king and British parliament.” Farr and.
44$ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The structure of the general government was freed from state
control in a truly radical fashion, but the scope of the authority
of the national sovereign as Madison initially formulated it was
breathtaking—it was a formulation worthy of the Sage of Malmes¬
bury himself. The national legislature was to be empowered to
disallow the acts of state legislatures, 24 and the central government
was vested, in addition to the powers of the nation under the Arti¬
cles of Confederation, with plenary authority wherever . . the
separate States are incompetent or in which the harmony of the
United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual
legislation.” 25 Finally, just to lock the door against state intrusion,
the national Congress was to be given the power to use military
force on recalcitrant states. 26 This was Madison’s “model” of an
ideal national government, though it later received little publicity
in The Federalist.
The interesting thing was the reaction of the Convention to this
militant program for a strong autonomous central government.
Some delegates were startled, some obviously leery of so com¬
prehensive a project of reform, 27 but nobody set off any fireworks
and nobody walked out. Moreover, in the two weeks that followed,
the Virginia Plan received substantial endorsement en principe;
the initial temper of the gathering can be deduced from the ap¬
proval “without debate or dissent,” on May 31, of the Sixth Resolu¬
tion which granted Congress the authority to disallow state legisla-
tion “... contravening in its opinion the Articles of Union.” Indeed,
an amendment was included to bar states from contravening na¬
tional treaties. 28
The Virginia Plan may therefore be considered, in ideological
terms, as the delegates’ Utopia, but as the discussions continued
I, 471. Forty-six years later, after Yates’ ‘"Notes” had been published, Mad¬
ison tried to explain this statement away as a misinterpretation: he did not
flatly deny the authenticity of Yates’ record, but attempted a defense that
was half justification and half evasion. Madison to W. C. Rives, Oct. 21,
1833. Farrand , HI, 521-524.
^Resolution. 6 gave the National Legislature this power subject to review
by the Council of Revision proposed in Resolution 8.
^Resolution 6.
nibid.
See the discussions on May 30 and 31. “Mr. Charles Pinkney wished to
know of Mr. Randolph whether he meant to abolish the State Governts.
altogether ... Mr. Butler said he had not made up his mind on the subject
and was open to the light which discussion might throw on it . , . Genl.
Pinkney expressed a doubt . . . Mr. Gerry seemed to entertain the same
doubt. Farrand, I, 33-34. There were no denunciations—though it should
perhaps be added that Luther Martin had not vet arrived
28 Farrand , I, 54. (Italics added.)
JOHN R. ROCHE 449
and became more specific, many of those present began to have
second thoughts. After all, they were not residents of Utopia or
guardians in Plato's Republic who could simply impose a philo¬
sophical ideal on subordinate strata of the population. They were
practical politicians in a democratic society, and no matter what
their private dreams might be, they had to take home an acceptable
package and defend it—and their own political futures—against
predictable attack. On June 14 the breaking point between dream
and reality took place. Apparently realizing that under the Virginia
Plan, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania could virtually
dominate the national government—and probably appreciating
that to sell this program to “the folks back home" would be im¬
possible—the delegates from the small states dug in their heels
and demanded time for a consideration of alternatives. One gets a
graphic sense of the inner politics from John Dickinson's reproach
to Madison: “You see the consequences of pushing things too far.
Some of the members from the small States wish for two branches
in the General Legislature and are friends to a good National Gov¬
ernment; but we would sooner submit to a foreign power than . . .
be deprived of an equality of suffrage in both branches of the
Legislature, and thereby be thrown under the domination of the
large States." 29
The bare outline of the Journal entry for Tuesday, June 14, is
suggestive to anyone with extensive experience in deliberative
bodies. “It was moved by Mr. Patterson [sic, Paterson's name was
one of those consistently misspelled by Madison and everybody
else] seconded by Mr. Randolph that the further consideration of
the report from the Committee of the whole House [endorsing the
Virginia Plan] be postponed til tomorrow, and before the question
for postponement was taken, it was moved by Mr. Randolph sec¬
onded by Mr. Patterson that the House adjourn." 30 The House
adjourned by obvious preaxrangement of the two principals: since
the preceding Saturday when Brearley and Paterson of New Jersey
had announced their fundamental discontent with the representa¬
tional features of the Virginia Plan, the informal pressure had
certainly been building up to slow down the streamroller. Doubt¬
less there were extended arguments at the Indian Queen between
Madison and Paterson, the latter insisting that events were moving
rapidly towards a probably disastrous conclusion, towards a poli-
29 Ibid ., p. 242. Delaware’s delegates had been instructed by their general
assembly to maintain in any new system the voting equality of the states.
Farrand, IH, 574.
*>Ibid p. 240.
450 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Heal suicide pact. Now the process of accommodation was put into
action smoothly—and wisely, given the character and strength of
the doubters. Madison had the votes, but this was one of those
situations where the enforcement of mechanical majoritarianism
could easily have destroyed the objectives of the majority: the
Constitutionalists were in quest of a qualitative as well as a quan¬
titative consensus. This was hardly from deference to local Quaker
custom; it was a political imperative if they were to attain ratifica¬
tion.
Ill
According to the standard script, at this point the “states’-rights”
group intervened in force behind the New Jersey Plan, which
has been characteristically portrayed as a revision to the status
quo under the Articles of Confederation with but minor modifica¬
tions. A careful examination of the evidence indicates that only
in a marginal sense is this an accurate description. It is true that
the New Jersey Plan put the states back into the institutional
picture, but one could argue that to do so was a recognition of
political reality rather than an affirmation of states’-rights. A
serious case can be made that the advocates of the New Jersey
Plan, far from being ideological addicts of states’-rights, intended
to substitute for the Virginia Plan a system which would both retain
strong national power and have a chance of adoption in the states.
The leading spokesman for the project asserted quite clearly that
his views were based more on counsels of expediency than on
principle; said Paterson on June 16: "I came here not to speak my
own sentiments, but the sentiments of those who sent me. Our ob¬
ject is not such a Govemmt. as may be best in itself, but such a
one as our Constituents have authorized us to prepare, and as
they will approve.” 31 This is Madison’s version; in Yates’ tran¬
scription, there is a crucial sentence following the remarks above:
I believe that a little practical virtue is to be preferred to the
finest theoretical principles, which cannot be carried into effect.” 32
In his preliminary speech on June 9, Paterson had stated “. . . to
the public mind we must accommodate ourselves,” 33 and in his
notes for this and his later effort as well, the emphasis is the
same. The structure of government under the Articles should be
retained:
81 Ibid, p. 250.
**lbid ., p. 258.
33 Ibid p. 178.
JOHN P. EOCHE 451
2. Because it accords with the Sentiments of the People
[Proof:] 1. Corns. [Co mm issions from state legislatures de finin g
the jurisdiction of the delegates]
2. News-papers—Political Barometer. Jersey never would
have sent Delegates under the first [Virginia] Plan—
Not here to sport Opinions of my own. Wt. [What] can be done.
A little practicable Virtue preferrable to Theory. 34
This was a defense of political acumen, not of states’-rights. In
fact, Paterson’s notes of bis speech can easily be construed as
an argument for attaining the substantive objectives of the Vir¬
ginia Plan by a sound political route, i.e., pouring the new wine
in the old bottles. With a shrewd eye, Paterson queried:
Will the Operation and Force of the [central] Govt, depend upon
the mode of Representn.—No—it will depend upon the Quantum of
Power lodged in the leg. ex. and judy. Departments—Give [the exist¬
ing] Congress the same powers that you intend to give the two
Branches, [under the Virginia Plan] and I apprehend they will act with
as much Propriety and more Energy . . . 35
In other words, the advocates of the New Jersey Plan concentrated
their fire on what they held to be the political liabilities of the
Virginia Plan—which were matters of institutional structure—
rather than on the proposed scope of national authority. Indeed,
the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution first saw the light of
day in Paterson’s Sixth Resolution; the New Jersey Plan contem¬
plated the use of military force to secure compliance with na¬
tional law; and finally Paterson made clear his view that under
either the Virginia or the New Jersey systems, the general gov¬
ernment would . . act on individuals and not on states.” 36 From
the states’-rights viewpoint, this was heresy: the fundament of
that doctrine was the proposition that any central government
had as its constituents the states, not the people, and could only
reach the people through the agency of the state government.
Paterson then reopened the agenda of the Convention, but he
did so within a distinctly nationalist framework. Paterson’s posi¬
tion was one of favoring a strong central government in principle,
but opposing one which in fact put the big states in the saddle.
(The Virginia Plan, for all its abstract merits, did very well by
Virginia.) As evidence for this speculation, there is a curious and
^Ibid., p. 274.
“IMd., pp. 275-276.
““But it is said that this national government is to act on individuals and
not on states; and cannot a federal government be so framed as to operate
in the same way? It surely may.” Ibid., pp. 182—183; also ibid, at p. 276.
45 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
intriguing proposal among Paterson’s preliminary drafts of the
New Jersey Plan:
Whereas it is necessary in Order to form the People of the U.S.
of America in to a Nation, that the States should be consolidated, by
which means all the Citizens thereof will become equally intitled to
and will equally participate in the same Privileges and Rights ... it
is therefore resolved, that all the Lands contained wi thin the Limits
of each state individually, and of the U.S. generally be considered as
constituting one Body or Mass, and be divided into thirteen or more
integral parts.
Resolved, That such Divisions or integral Parts shall be styled Dis¬
tricts. 3 '?’
This makes it sound as though Paterson was prepared to accept
a strong unified central government along the lines of the Virginia
Plan if the existing states were eliminated. He may have gotten
the idea from his New Jersey colleague Judge David Brearley, who
on June 9 had commented that the only remedy to the dilemma
over representation was “. . . that a map of the U.S. be spread out,
that all the existing boundaries be erased, and that a new partition
of the whole be made into 13 equal parts.” 38 According to Yates,
Brearley added at this point, “. . . then a government on the pres¬
ent [Virginia Plan] system will be just.” 39
This proposition was never pushed—it was patently unrealistic
—but one can appreciate its purpose: it would have separated the
men from the boys in the large-state delegations. How attached
would the Virginians have been to their reform principles if Vir-
ghna were to disappear as a component geographical unit (the
largest) for representational purposes? Up to this point, the Vir¬
ginians had been in the happy position of supporting high ideals
with that inner confidence bom of knowledge that the “public
interest” they endorsed would nourish their private interest. Worse,
they had shown little willingness to compromise. Now the dele¬
gates from the small states announced that they were unprepared
to be offered up as sacrificial victims to a “national interest” which
reflected Virginia’s parochial ambition. Caustic Charles Pinckney
was not far off when he remarked sardonically that “. . . the whole
[conflict] comes to this”: “Give N. Jersey an equal vote, and she
will dismiss her scruples, and concur in the Natil. system.” 40 What
he rather unfairly did not add was that the Jersey delegates were
37 Farrand, , III, 613.
"Farrand, I, 177.
“Bid., p. 182.
“Bid., p. 255.
JOHN P. EOCHE 453
not free agents who could adhere to their private convictions; they
had to take back, sponsor and risk their reputations on the reforms
approved by the Convention—and in New Jersey, not in Virginia.
Paterson spoke on Saturday, and one can surmise that over
the weekend there was a good deal of consultation, argument, and
caucusing among the delegates. One member at least prepared a
full length address: on Monday Alexander Hamilton, previously
mute, rose and delivered a six-hour oration. 41 It was a remarkably
apolitical speech; the gist of his position was that both the Vir¬
ginia and New Jersey Plans were inadequately centralist, and he
detailed a reform program which was reminiscent of the Protec¬
torate under the Cromwellian Instrument of Government of 1653.
It has been suggested that Hamilton did this in the best political
tradition to emphasize the moderate character of the Virginia
Plan, 42 to give the cautious delegates something really to worry
about; but this interpretation seems somehow too clever. Partic¬
ularly since the sentiments Hamilton expressed happened to be
completely consistent with those he privately—and sometimes
publicly—expressed throughout his life. He wanted, to take a
striking phrase from a letter to George Washington, a "‘strong well
mounted government”; 43 in essence, the Hamilton Plan contem¬
plated an elected life monarch, virtually free of public control, on
the Hobbesian ground that only in this fashion could strength and
stability be achieved. The other alternatives, he argued, would put
policy-making at the mercy of the passions of the mob; only if the
sovereign was beyond the reach of selfish influence would it be
possible to have government in the interests of the whole com¬
munity. 44
From all accounts, this was a masterful and compelling speech,
but (aside from furnishing John Lansing and Luther Martin with
ammunition for later use against the Constitution) it made little
impact. Hamilton was simply transmitting on a different wave¬
length from the rest of the delegates; the latter adjourned after
his great effort, admired his rhetoric, and then returned to busi¬
ness. 45 It was rather as if they had taken a day off to attend the
opera. Hamilton, never a particularly patient man or much of a
41 J. C, Hamilton, cited ibid., p. 293.
"See, e.g., Mitchell, op. cit, p. 381.
"Hamilton to Washington, July 3, 1787, Farrand, III, 53.
44 A reconstruction of the Hamilton Plan is found in Farrand, III, 617-630.
"Said William Samuel Johnson on June 21: * 4 A gentleman from New-York,
with boldness and decision, proposed a system totally different from both
[Virginia and New Jersey]; and though he has been praised by every body,
he has been supported by none/" Farrand, I, 363.
454 reinterpretation of the American revolution
negotiator, stayed for another ten days and then left, in consider-
able disgust, for New York. 46 Although he came back to Philadel¬
phia sporadically and attended the last two weeks of the Conven¬
tion, Hamilton played no part in the laborious task of hammering
out the Constitution. His day came later when he led the New
York Constitutionalists into the savage imbroglio over ratification
—an arena in which his unmatched talent for dirty political in¬
fighting may well have won the day. For instance, in the New
York Ratifying Convention, Lansing threw back into Hamilton’s
teeth the sentiments the latter had expressed in his June 18
oration in the Convention. However, having since retreated to
the fine defensive positions immortalized in The Federalist, the
Colonel flatly denied that he had ever been an enemy of the
states, or had believed that conflict between states and nation was
inexorable! As Madison’s authoritative Notes did not appear until
1840, and there had been no press coverage, there was no way to
verify his assertions, so in the words of the reporter, "... a warm
personal altercation between [Lansing and Hamilton] engrossed
the remainder of the day [June 28, 1788].” 47
IV
On Tuesday morning, June 19, the vacation was over. James
Madison led off with a long, carefully reasoned speech analyzing
the New Jersey Plan which, while intellectually vigorous in its
criticisms, was quite conciliatory in mood. ‘The great difficulty,”
he observed, ‘lies in the affair of Representation; and if this
could be adjusted, all others would be surmountable.” 46 (As events
were to demonstrate, this diagnosis was correct.) When he fin¬
ished, a vote was taken on whether to continue with the Virginia
Plan as the nucleus for a new constitution: seven states voted
“Yes”; New York, New Jersey, and Delaware voted "No”; and
Maryland, whose position often depended on which delegates
happened to be on the floor, divided. 49 Paterson, it seems, lost
"See his letter to Washington cited supra note 43.
47 Farrand , HI, 338.
^Farrand, I, 321.
politics in this period were only a bit less intricate than
: gentry, in much the same fashion that Namier
T.?nv^ Tf^i, Erlglaild ’* divide '* U P among families—Chases, Carrolls, Pacas,
® te -—®? d engaged in what seemed, to the outsider,
SlfSrrt 11 *]? 31 ¥° rns dances. See Philip A. Crowl, Maryland During
bl^ 1943). The Maryland General Assem¬
bly named five delegates to the Convention and provided that “the said
JOHN P. ROCHE 455
decisively; yet in a fundamental sense lie and his allies had
achieved their purpose: from that day onward, it could never be
forgotten that the state governments loomed ominously in the
background and that no verbal incantations could exorcise their
power. Moreover, nobody bolted the convention: Paterson and his
colleagues took their defeat in stride and set to work to modify
the Virginia Plan, particularly with respect to its provisions on
representation in the national legislature. Indeed, they won an
immediate rhetorical bonus; when Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut
rose to move that the word “national” be expunged from the
Third Virginia Resolution (“Resolved that a national Government
ought to be established consisting of a supreme Legislative, Execu¬
tive and Judiciary” 50 ), Randolph agreed and the motion passed
unanimously. 51 The process of compromise had begun.
For the next two weeks, the delegates circled around the prob¬
lem of legislative representation. The Connecticut delegation ap¬
pears to have evolved a possible compromise quite early in the de¬
bates, but the Virginians and particularly Madison (unaware that
he would later be acclaimed as the prophet of “federalism”) fought
obdurately against providing for equal representation of states in
the second chamber. There was a good deal of acrimony and at
one point Benjamin Franklin—of all people—proposed the institu¬
tion of a daily prayer; practical politicians in the gathering how¬
ever, were mediating more on the merits of a good committee than
on the utility of Divine intervention. On July 2, the ice began to
break when through a number of fortuitous events 52 —and one
Deputies or such of them as shall attend . . . shall have full Power to
represent this State,” Farr and , III, 586. The interesting circumstance was
that three of the delegates were Constitutionalists (Carroll, McHenry and
Jenifer), while two were opposed (Martin and Mercer); and this led to an
ad hoc determination of where Maryland would stand when votes were
taken. The vote on equality of representation, to be described infra, was an
important instance of this eccentricity.
“This formulation was voted into the Randolph Plan on May 30, 1787,
by a vote of six states to none, with one divided. Farrand, I, 30.
^Farrand, I, 335-336. In agreeing, Randolph stipulated his disagreement
with Ellsworth’s rationale, but said he did not object to merely changing
an "expression.” Those who subject the Constitution to minute semantic
analysis might do well to keep this instance in mind; if Randolph could so
concede the deletion of "national,” one may wonder if any word changes
can be given much weight.
^According to Luther Martin, he was alone on the floor and cast Mary¬
land’s vote for equality of representation. Shortly thereafter, Jenifer came
on the floor and "Mr. King, from Massachusetts, valuing himself on Mr.
Jenifer to divide the State of Maryland on this question . . . requested of
the President that the question might be put again; however, the motion
was too extraordinary in its nature to meet with success.” Cited from "The
Genuine Information . . .” Farrand, HI, 188.
456 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that seems deliberate 53 —the majority against equality of repre¬
sentation was converted into a dead tie. The Convention had
reached the stage where it was “ripe” for a solution (presumably
all the therapeutic speeches had been made), and the South Caro¬
linians proposed a committee. Madison and James Wilson wanted
none of it, but with only Pennsylvania dissenting, the body voted
to establish a working party on the problem of representation.
The members of this committee, one from each state, were
elected by the delegates—and a very interesting committee it was.
Despite the fact that the Virginia Plan had held majority support
up to that date, neither Madison nor Randolph was selected
(Mason was the Virginian) and Baldwin of Georgia, whose shift
in position had resulted in the tie, was chosen. From the composi¬
tion, it was clear that this was not to be a “fighting” committee:
the emphasis in membership was on what might be described as
“second-level political entrepreneurs.” On the basis of the discus¬
sions up to that time, only Luther Martin of Maryland could be
described as a “bitter-ender.” Admittedly, some divination enters
into this sort of analysis, but one does get a sense of the mood of
the delegates from these choices—including the interesting selec¬
tion of Benjamin Franklin, despite his age and intellectual wobbli¬
ness, over the brilliant and incisive Wilson or the sharp, polemical
Gouvemeur Morris, to represent Pennsylvania. His passion for
conciliation was more valuable at this juncture than Wilson’s
logical genius, or Morris’ acerbic wit.
There is a common rumor that the Framers divided their time
between philosophical discussions of government and reading the
classics in political theory. Perhaps this is as good a time as any
to note that their concerns were highly practical, that they spent
little time canvassing abstractions. A number of them had some
acquaintance with the history of political theory (probably gained
from reading John Adams’ monumental compilation A Defense of
the Constitutions of Government,^ the first volume of which ap-
^amely Baldwin’s vote for equality of representation which divided
Georgia—with Few absent and Pierce in New York fighting a duel, Houston
voted against equality and Baldwin shifted to tie the state. Baldwin was
originally from Connecticut and attended and tutored at Yale, facts which
have led to much speculation about the pressures the Connecticut delegation
may have brought on h i m to save the day (Georgia was the last state to
vote) and open the way to compromise. To employ a good Russian phrase,
it was certainly not an accident that Baldwin voted the way he did. See
Warren , p. 262.
^For various contemporary comments, see Warren , pp. 814-818. On
Adams’ technique, see Zoltan Haraszti, “The Composition of Adams’
Defense ” in John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, 1952),
JOHN P. ROCHE 457
peared in 1786), and it was a poor rhetorician indeed who could
not cite Locke, Montesquieu, or Harrington in support of a desired
goal. Yet up to this point in the deliberations, no one had ex¬
pounded a defense of states’-rights or the "separation of powers”
on anything resembling a theoretical basis. It should be reiterated
that the Madison model had no room either for the states or for
the "separation of powers”: effectively all governmental power was
vested in the national legislature. The merits of Montesquieu did
not turn up until The Federalist; and although a perverse argu¬
ment could be made that Madison’s ideal was truly in the tradi¬
tion of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, 55 the Locke
whom the American rebels treated as an honorary president was
a pluralistic defender of vested rights, 56 not of parliamentary
supremacy.
It would be tedious to continue a blow-by-blow analysis of the
work of the delegates; the critical fight was over representation
of the states and once the Connecticut Compromise was adopted
on July 17, the Convention was over the hump. Madison, James
Wilson, and Gouvemeur Morris of New York (who was there
representing Pennsylvania!) fought the compromise all the way in
a last-ditch effort to get a unitary state with parliamentary su¬
premacy. But their allies deserted them and they demonstrated
after their defeat the essentially opportunist character of their
objections—using "opportunist” here in a non-pejorative sense,
to indicate a willingness to swallow their objections and get on
with the business. Moreover, once the compromise had carried
(by five states to four, with one state divided), its advocates
ch. 9. In this connection it is interesting to check the Convention discussions
for references to the authority of Locke, Montesquieu and Harrington, the
theorists who have been assigned various degrees of paternal responsibility.
There are no explicit references to James Harrington; one to John Locke
(Luther Martin cited him on the state of nature, Farr and, I, 437); and seven
to Montesquieu, only one of which related to the "separation of powers”
(Madison in an odd speech, which he explained in a footnote was given to
help a friend rather than advance his own views, cited Montesquieu on the
separation of the executive and legislative branches, Farrand, H, 34). This,
of course, does not prove that Locke and Co. were without influence; it
shifts the burden of proof, however, to those who assert ideological causality.
See Benjamin F. Wright, "The Origins of the Separation of Powers in
America,” Economica, Vol. 13 (1933), p. 184.
K I share Willmoore Kendall's interpretation of Locke as a supporter of
parliamentary supremacy and majoritarianism; see Kendall, John Locke and
the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Urbana, 1941). Kendall’s general position has
recently received strong support in the definitive edition and commentary
of Peter Laslett, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1960).
“The American Locke is best delineated in Carl Becker, The Declaration
of Independence (New York, 1948).
I
I
45^ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
threw themselves vigorously into the job of strengthening the
general government’s substantive powers—as might have been
predicted, indeed, from Paterson’s early statements. It nourishes
an increased respect for Madison’s devotion to the art of politics,
to realize that this dogged fighter could sit down six months later
and prepare essays for The Federalist in contradiction to his basic
convictions about the true course the Convention should have
taken.
V
Two tricky issues will serve to illustrate the later process of ac¬
commodation. The first was the institutional position of the
Executive. Madison argued for an executive chosen by the Na¬
tional Legislature and on May 29 this had been adopted with a
provision that after his seven-year term was concluded, the chief
magistrate should not be eligible for reelection. In late July this
was reopened and for a week the matter was argued from sev¬
eral different points of view. A good deal of desultory speech¬
making ensued, but the gist of the problem was the opposition
from two sources to election by the legislature. One group felt
that the states should have a hand in the process; another small
but influential circle urged direct election by the people. There
were a number of proposals: election by the people, election by
state governors, by electors chosen by state legislatures, by the
National Legislature (James Wilson, perhaps ironically, proposed
at one point that an Electoral College be chosen by lot from the
National Legislature!), and there was some resemblance to three-
dimensional chess in the dispute because of the presence of two
other variables, length of tenure and reeligibility. Finally, after
opening, reopening, and re-reopening the debate, the thorny prob¬
lem was consigned to a committee for resolution.
The Breaxley Committee on Postponed Matters was a superb
aggregation of talent and its compromise on the Executive was a
masterpiece of political improvisation. (The Electoral College, its
creation, however, had little in its favor as an institution—as the
delegates well appreciated.) The point of departure for all dis¬
cussion about the presidency in the Convention was that in im¬
mediate terms, the problem was non-existent; in other words,
everybody present knew that under any system devised, George
Washington would be President. Thus they were dealing in the
JOHN P. ROCHE 459
future tense and to a body of working politicians the merits of the
Brearley proposal were obvious: everybody got a piece of cake.
(Or to put it more academically, each viewpoint could leave the
Convention and argue to its constituents that it had really won
the day.) First, the state legislatures had the right to determine
the mode of selection of the electors; second, the small states re¬
ceived a bonus in the Electoral College in the form of a guaranteed
minimum of three votes while the big states got acceptance
of the principle of proportional power; third, if the state
legislatures agreed (as six did in the first presidential election),
the people could be involved directly in the choice of electors; and
finally, if no candidate received a majority in the College, the
right of decision passed to the National Legislature with each
state exercising equal strength. (In the Brearley recommendation,
the election went to the Senate, but a motion from the floor sub¬
stituted the House; this was accepted on the ground that the
Senate already had enough authority over the executive in its
treaty and appointment powers.)
This compromise was almost too good to be true, and the
Framers snapped it up with little debate or controversy. No one
seemed to think well of the College as an institution; indeed, what
evidence there is suggests that there was an assumption that once
Washington had finished his tenure as President, the electors
would cease to produce majorities and the chief executive would
usually be chosen in the House. George Mason observed casually
that the selection would be made in the House nineteen times in
twenty and no one seriously disputed this point. The vital aspect
of the Electoral College was that it got the Convention over the
hurdle and protected everybody’s interests. The future was left to
cope with the problem of what to do with this Bube Goldberg
mechanism.
In short, the Framers did not in their wisdom endow the United
States with a College of Cardinals—the Electoral College was
neither an exercise in applied Platonism nor an experiment in
indirect government based on elitist distrust of the masses. It was
merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been
endowed with a high theoretical content. When an elector from
Oklahoma in 1960 refused to cast his vote for Nixon (naming
Byrd and Goldwater instead) on the ground that the Founding
Fathers intended him to exercise his great independent wisdom
he was indulging in historical fantasy. If one were to indulge in
counter-fantasy, he would be tempted to suggest that the Fathers
460 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
would be startled to find the College still in operation—and per¬
haps even dismayed at their descendants’ lack of judgment or
inventiveness. 57
The second issue on which some substantial practical bargain¬
ing took place was slavery. The morality of slavery was, by design,
not at issue; 58 but in its other concrete aspects, slavery colored
the arguments over taxation, commerce, and representation. The
“Three-Fifths Compromise,” that three-fifths of the slaves would
be counted both for representation and for purposes of direct
taxation (which was drawn from the past—it was a formula of
Madison’s utilized by Congress in 1783 to establish the basis of
state contributions to the Confederation treasury) had allayed
some Northern fears about Southern over-representation (no one
then foresaw the trivial role that direct taxation would play in
later federal financial policy), but doubts still remained. The
Southerners, on the other hand, were afraid that Congressional
control over commerce would lead to the exclusion of slaves or to
their excessive taxation as imports. Moreover, the Southerners
were disturbed over “navigation acts,” i.e., tariffs or special legis¬
lation providing, for example, that exports be carried only in
American ships; as a section depending upon exports, they wanted
protection from the potential voracity of their commercial brethren
of the Eastern states. To achieve this end, Mason and others urged
that the Constitution include a proviso that navigation and com¬
mercial laws should require a two-thirds vote in Congress.
These problems came to a head in late August and, as usual
were handed to a committee in the hope that, in Gouvemeur
Morris words, *. . . these things may form a bargain among the
Northern and Southern states.” 59 The Committee reported its
measures of reconciliation on August 25, and on August 29 the
package was wrapped up and delivered. What occurred can best
be described in George Mason’s dour version (he anticipated
Calhoun in his conviction that permitting navigation acts to pass
by majority vote would put the South in economic bondage to
the North it was mainly on this ground that he refused to sign
the Constitution):
wj? 1 3oh ?£: n ° che ’ Electoral College: A Note on American Political
My&ology Dwsent (Spnng, 1961), pp. 197-199. The relevant debates took
pp SO^SSl 9 ” 26, 1?87 ’ FaTT(md > ll > 50-128, and September 5-6, 1787, ibid.,
®See the discussion on August 22, 1787, Farrand, H, 366-375; King seems
to have expressed the sense of the Convention when he said, “the subject
sh ^ d be considered in a political light only” Ibid, at 373.
Farrand, II, 374. Randolph echoed his sentiment in different words.
JOHN P. ROCHE 461
The Constitution as agreed to till a fortnight before the Convention
rose was such a one as he would have set his hand and heart to. . . .
[Until that time] The 3 New England States were constantly with us
in all questions ... so that it was these three States with the 5 South¬
ern ones against Pennsylvania, Jersey and Delaware. With respect to
the importation of slaves, [decision-making] was left to Congress. This
disturbed the two Southernmost States who knew that Congress would
immediately suppress the importation of slaves. Those two States
therefore struck up a bargain with the three New England States. If
they would join to admit slaves for some years, the two Southern-most
States would join in changing the clause which required the % of the
Legislature in any vote [on navigation acts]. It was done. 60
On the floor of the Convention there was a virtual love-feast
on this happy occasion. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina at¬
tempted to overturn the committee’s decision, when the compro¬
mise was reported to the Convention, by insisting that the South
needed protection from the imperialism of the Northern states.
But his Southern colleagues were not prepared to rock the boat
and General C. C. Pinckney arose to spread oil on the suddenly
ruffled waters; he admitted that:
It was in the true interest of the S[outhem] States to have no regu¬
lation of commerce; but considering the loss brought on the commerce
of the Eastern States by the Revolution, their liberal conduct towards
the views of South Carolina [on the regulation of the slave trade] and
the interests the weak Southn. States had in being united with the
strong Eastern states, he thought it proper that no fetters should be
imposed on the power of making commercial regulations; and that his
constituents , though prejudiced against the Eastern States , would be
reconciled to this liberality. He had himself prejudices agst the Eastern
States before he came here, but would acknowledge that he had found
them as liberal and candid as any men whatever. (Italics added.) 61
Pierce Butler took the same tack, essentially arguing that he was
not too happy about the possible consequences, but that a deal
was a deal. 62 Many Southern leaders were later—in the wake of
“Mason to Jefferson, cited in Warren, p. 584.
^August 29, 1787, Farrand, II, 449-450.
* 2 Ibid., p. 451. The plainest statement of the matter was put by the three
North Carolina delegates (Blount, Spaight and Williamson) in their report
to Governor Caswell, September 18, 1787. After noting that "no exertions
have been wanting on our part to guard and promote the particular interest
of North Carolina,” they went on to explain the basis of the negotiations in
cold-blooded fashion: "While we were taking so much care to guard our¬
selves against being over reached and to form rules of Taxation that might
operate in our favour, it is not to be supposed that our Northern Brethren
were Inattentive to their particular Interest. A navigation Act or the power
to regulate Commerce in the Hands of the National Government ... is
462 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the ‘Tariff of Abominations”—to rue this day of reconciliation;
Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government was little more than an
extension of the argument in the Convention against permitting a
congressional majority to enact navigation acts. 63
VI
Drawing on their vast collective political experience, utilizing
every weapon in the politician’s arsenal, looking constantly over
their shoulders at their constituents, the delegates put together a
Constitution. It was a makeshift affair; some sticky issues (for
example, the qualification of voters) they ducked entirely; others
they mastered with that ancient instrument of political sagacity,
studied ambiguity (for example, citizenship), and some they just
overlooked. In this last category, I suspect, fell the matter of the
power of the federal courts to determine the constitutionality of
acts of Congress. When the judicial article was formulated (Arti¬
cle III of the Constitution), deliberations were still in the stage
where the legislature was endowed with broad power under the
Randolph formulation, authority which by its own terms was
scarcely amenable to judicial review. In essence, courts could
hardly determine when * . . the separate States are incompetent
or . . . the harmony of the United States may be interrupted”;
the National Legislature, as critics pointed out, was free to define
its own jurisdiction. Later the definition of legislative authority
was changed into the form we know, a series of stipulated powers,
but the delegates never seriously reexamined the jurisdiction of
the judiciary under this new limited formulation. 6 * All arguments
what the Southern States have given in Exchange for the advantages we
Mentioned.” They concluded by explaining that while the Constitution did
deal with other matters besides taxes—"there are other Considerations of
great Magnitude involved in the system”—they would not take up valuable
time with boring details! Farr and, HI, 83-84.
“See John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New York, 1943),
pp. 21-25, 38. Calhoun differed from Mason, and others in the Convention
who urged the two-thirds requirement, by advocating a functional or interest
veto rather than some sort of special majority, i.e., he abandoned the search
for quantitative checks in favor of a qualitative solution.
“The Committee on Detail altered die general grant of legislative power
envisioned by the Virginia Plan into a series of specific grants; these were
exa min ed closely between August 16 and August 23. One day only was
devoted to the Judicial Article, August 27, and since no one raised the ques¬
tion of judicial review of Federal statutes, no light was cast on the matter.
A number of random comments on the power of the judiciary were scattered
throughout the discussions, but there was another variable which deprives
them of much probative value: the proposed Council of Revision which
JOHN P. ROCHE 463
on the intention of the Framers in this matter are thus deductive
and a posteriori, though some obviously make more sense than
others. 65
The Framers were busy and distinguished men, anxious to get
back to their families, their positions, and their constituents, not
members of the French Academy devoting a lifetime to a diction¬
ary. They were trying to do an important job, and do it in such
a fashion that their handwork would be acceptable to very diverse
constituencies. No one was rhapsodic about the final document,
but it was a beginning, a move in the right direction, and one
they had reason to believe the people would endorse. In addition,
since they had modified the impossible amendment provisions of
the Articles (the requirement of unanimity which could always
be frustrated by “Rogues Island”) to one demanding approval
by only three-quarters of the states, they seemed confident that
gaps in the fabric which experience would reveal could be re¬
woven without undue difficulty.
So with a neat phrase introduced by Benjamin Franklin (but
devised by Gouvemeur Morris) 66 which made their decision sound
unanimous, and an inspired benediction by the Old Doctor urging
doubters to doubt their own infallibility, the Constitution was
accepted and signed. Curiously, Edmund Randolph, who had
played so vital a role throughout, refused to sign, as did his fellow
Virginian George Mason and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.
Randolph’s behavior was eccentric, to say the least—his excuses
for refusing his signature have a factitious ring even at this late
date; the best explanation seems to be that he was afraid that
the Constitution would prove to be a liability in Virginia politics,
where Patrick Henry was burning up the countryside with im¬
passioned denunciations. Presumably, Randolph wanted to check
the temper of the populace before he risked his reputation, and
would have joined the Executive with the judges in legislative review.
Madison and Wilson, for example, favored this technique—which had noth¬
ing in common with what we think of as judicial review except that judges
were involved in the task.
^For what it may be worth, I think that judicial review of congressional
acts was logically on all fours with review of state enactments and that
it was certainly consistent with the view that the Constitution could not be
amended by the Congress and President, or by a two-thirds vote of Congress
(overriding a veto), without the agreement of three-quarters of the states.
External evidence from that time supports this view, see Charles Warren,
Congress, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court (Boston, 1925), pp. 41—
128, but the debates in the Convention prove nothing.
“Or so Madison stated, Farr and, U, 643. Wilson too may have contributed;
he was close to Franklin and delivered the frail old gentleman’s speeches
for him.
464 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
perhaps his job, in a fight with both Henry and Richard Henry
Lee. 67 Events lend some justification to this speculation: after
much temporizing and use of the conditional subjunctive tense,
Randolph endorsed ratification in Virginia and ended up getting
the best of both worlds.
Madison, despite his reservations about the Constitution, was
the campaign manager in ratification. His first task was to get
the Congress in New York to light its own funeral pyre by ap¬
proving the "amendments” to the Articles and sending them on
to the state legislatures. Above all, momentum had to be main¬
tained. The anti-Constitutionalists, now thoroughly alarmed and
no novices in politics, realized that their best tactic was attrition
rather than direct opposition. Thus they settled on a position
expressing qualified approval but calling for a second Convention
to remedy various defects (the one with the most demagogic
appeal was the lack of a Bill of Rights). Madison knew that to
accede to this demand would be equivalent to losing the battle,
nor would he agree to conditional approval (despite wavering
even by Hamilton). This was an all-or-nothing proposition: na¬
tional salvation or national impotence with no intermediate
positions possible. Unable to get congressional approval, he settled
for second best: a unanimous resolution of Congress transmitting
the Constitution to the states for whatever action they saw fit
to take. The opponents then moved from New York and the
Congress, where they had attempted to attach amendments and
conditions, to the states for the final battle. 68
At first the campaign for ratification went beautifully: within
eight months after the delegates set their names on the document,
eight states had ratified. Only in Massachusetts had the result
been close (187—168). Theoretically, a ratification by one more
state convention would set the new government in motion, but
in fact until Virginia and New York acceded to the new Union,
the latter was fiction. New Hampshire was the next to ratify;
See a very interesting letter, from an unknown source in Philadelphia,
to Jefferson, October 11, 1787: “Randolph wishes it well, & it is thought
^ OU rT, *L ave si S ned hut he wanted to be on a footing with a popular
rorrand, HI, 104. Madison, writing Jefferson a full account on
October 24, 1787, put the matter more delicately—he was working hard on
Randolph to win him for ratification: “[Randolph] was not inveterate in his
opposition, and grounded his refusal to subscribe pretty much on his un¬
willingness to commit himself, so as not to be at liberty to be governed bv
further lights on the subject.” Ibid,, p. 135. J B y
“See Edward P. Smith, “The Movement Towards a Second Constitutional
Convention in 1788,” in J. F. Jameson, ed.. Essays in the Constitutional
History of the United States (Boston, 1889), pp. 46-115.
JOHN P. ROCHE 465
Rhode Island was Involved in its characteristic political convul¬
sions (the Legislature there sent the Constitution out to the towns
for decision by popular vote and it got lost among a series of local
issues); 69 North Carolina’s convention did not meet until July
and then postponed a final decision. This is hardly the place for
an extensive analysis of the conventions of New York and Vir¬
ginia. Suffice it to say that the Constitutionalists clearly out-
maneuvered their opponents, forced them into impossible political
positions, and won both states narrowly. The Virginia Convention
could serve as a classic study in effective floor management:
Patrick Henry had to be contained, and a reading of the debates
discloses a standard two-stage technique. Henry would give a
four-or-five-hour speech denouncing some section of the Consti¬
tution on every conceivable ground (the federal district, he
averred at one point, would become a haven for convicts escaping
from state authority!); 70 when Henry subsided, “Mr. Lee of West¬
moreland” would rise and literally poleaxe him with sardonic
invective (when Henry complained about the militia power,
“Lighthorse Harry” really punched below the belt: observing that
while the former Governor had been sitting in Richmond during
the Revolution, he had been out in the trenches with the troops
and thus felt better qualified to discuss military affairs). 71 Then
the gentlemanly Constitutionalists (Madison, Pendleton and Mar¬
shall) would pick up the matters at issue and examine them in
the light of reason.
Indeed, modem Americans who tend to think of James Madison
as a rather dessicated character should spend some time with
this transcript. Probably Madison put on his most spectacular
demonstration of nimble rhetoric in what might be called “The
Battle of the Absent Authorities.” Patrick Henry in the course of
one of his harangues alleged that Jefferson was known to be
opposed to Virginia’s approving the Constitution. This was clever:
Henry hated Jefferson, but was prepared to use any weapon that
came to hand. Madison’s riposte was superb: First, he said that
with all due respect to the great reputation of Jefferson, he was
not in the country and therefore could not formulate an adequate
judgment; second, no one should utilize the reputation of an
^See Bishop, op. tit., passim.
70 See Elliot’s Debates on the Federal Constitution (Washington, 1836), Vol.
3, pp. 436-438.
^This should be quoted to give the full flavor: “Without vanity, I may
say I have had different experience of [militia] service from that of [Henry].
It was my fortune to be a soldier of my country. ... I saw what the hon¬
orable gentlemen did not see—our men fighting. . . Ibid., p. 178.
466 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
outsider—the Virginia Convention was there to think for itself;
third, if there were to be recourse to outsiders, the opinions of
George Washington should certainly be taken into consideration;
and finally, he knew from privileged personal communication
from Jefferson that in fact the latter strongly favored the Con¬
stitution. 72 To devise an assault route into this rhetorical fortress
was literally impossible.
VII
The fight was over; all that remained now was to establish the
new frame of government in the spirit of its framers. And who
were better qualified for this task than the Framers themselves?
Thus victory for the Constitution meant simultaneous victory for
the Constitutionalists; the anti-Constitutionalists either capitulated
or vanished into limbo—soon Patrick Henry would be offered a
seat on the Supreme Court 78 and Luther Martin would be known
as the Federalist “bull-dog.’' 74 And irony of ironies, Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison would shortly accumulate a repu¬
tation as the formulators of what is often alleged to be our
political theory, the concept of “federalism." Also, on the other
side of the ledger, the arguments would soon appear over what
the Framers “really meant”; while these disputes have assumed
the proportions of a big scholarly business in the last century,
they began almost before the ink on the Constitution was dry.
One of the best early ones featured Hamilton versus Madison on
the scope of presidential power, and other Framers character¬
istically assumed positions in this and other disputes on the basis
of their political convictions.
Probably our greatest difficulty is that we know so much more
about what the Framers should haw meant, than they themselves
did. We are intimately acquainted with the problems that their
Constitution should have been designed to master; in short, we
have read the mystery story backwards. If we are to get the right
“feel” for their time and their circumstances, we must in Mait-
"I bid., p. 329.
"Washington offered him the Chief Justiceship in 1796, but he declined;
Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United State* HUtory (Boston,
1947), Vol. 1, p. 139.
"He was a zealous prosecutor of sedition in the period 1798 1800; with
Justice Samuel Chase, like himself an alleged "radical” at the time of the
Constitutional Convention, Martin bunted down Jeffersonian heretics. See
James M. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters (Ithaca, 1956) pp. 342-343.
JOHN P. ROCHE 467
land’s phrase, . . think ourselves back into the twilight.” Obvi¬
ously, no one can pretend completely to escape from the solipsistic
web of his own environment, but if the effort is made, it is
possible to appreciate the past roughly on its own terms. The
first step in this process is to abandon the academic premise that
because we can ask a question, there must be an answer.
Thus we can ask what the Framers meant when they gave
Congress the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce,
and we emerge, reluctantly perhaps, with the reply that (Profes¬
sor Crosskey to the contrary notwithstanding) 75 they may not
have known what they meant, that there may not have been any
semantic consensus. The Convention was not a seminar in ana¬
lytic philosophy or linguistic analysis. Commerce was commerce
and if different interpretations of the word arose, later genera¬
tions could worry about the problem of definition. The delegates
were in a hurry to get a new government established; when
definitional arguments arose, they characteristically took refuge
in ambiguity. If different men voted for the same proposition for
varying reasons, that was politics (and still is); if later genera¬
tions were unsettled by this lack of precision, that would be
their problem.
There was a good deal of definitional pluralism with respect to
the problems the delegates did discuss, but when we move to the
question of extrapolated intentions, we enter the realm of spiritu-
TC Crosskey in his sprawling Politics and the Constitution (Chicago, 1953),
2 vols., has developed with almost unbelievable zeal and intricacy the thesis
that the Constitution was designed to establish a centralized unitary state,
but that the political leadership of the Republic in its formative years be¬
trayed this ideal and sold the pass to states’-rights. While he has unearthed
some interesting newspaper articles and other material, it is impossible for
me to accept his central proposition. Madison and the other delegates, with
the exceptions discussed in the text supra, did want to diminish the
power of the states and create a vigorous national government. But they
were not fools, and were, I submit, under no illusions when they de¬
parted from Philadelphia that this end had been accomplished. The
crux of my argument is that political realities forced them to water
down their objectives and they settled, like the good politicans they were,
for half a loaf. The basic diffi culty with Crosskey’s thesis is that he knows
too much—he assumes that the Framers had a perfectly clear idea of the
road they were taking; with a semantic machete he cuts blandly through
all the confusion on the floor of the meeting to the real meanings. Thus,
despite all of his ornate research apparatus, there is a fundamentally non-
empirical quality about Crosskey’s work: at crucial points in the argu¬
ment he falls back on a type of divination which can only be described as
Kabbalistic. He may be right, for example, in stating (without any proof)
that Richard Henry Lee did not write the “Letters from a Federal Farmer,”
but in this country spectral evidence has not been admissable since the
Seventeenth Century.
w
468 HE INTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
alism. When men in our time, for instance, launch into elaborate
talmudic exegesis to demonstrate that federal aid to parochial
schools is (or is not) in accord with the intentions of the men
who established the Republic and endorsed the Bill of Rights,
they are engaging in historical Extra-Sensory Perception. (If one
were to join this E. S. P. contingent for a minute, he might
suggest that the hard-boiled politicians who wrote the Consti¬
tution and Bill of Rights would chuckle scornfully at such an
invocation of authority: obviously a politician would chart his
course on the intentions of the living, not of the dead, and count
the numbers of Catholics in his constituency.)
The Constitution, then, was not an apotheosis of “constitutional¬
ism,” a triumph of architectonic genius; it was a patch-work sewn
together under the pressure of both time and events by a group
of extremely talented democratic politicians. They refused to
attempt the establishment of a strong, centralized sovereignty
on the principle of legislative supremacy for the excellent reason
that the people would not accept it. They risked their political
fortunes by opposing the established doctrines of state sovereignty
because they were convinced that the existing system was leading
to national impotence and probably foreign domination. For two
years, they worked to get a convention established. For over three
months, in what must have seemed to the faithful participants
an endless process of give-and-take, they reasoned, cajoled, threat¬
ened, and bargained amongst themselves. The result was a
Constitution which the people, in fact, by democratic processes,
did accept, and a new and far better national government was
established.
Beginning with the inspired propaganda of Hamilton, Madison
and Jay, the ideological build-up got under way. The Federalist
had little impact on the ratification of the Constitution, except
perhaps in New York, but this volume had enormous influence
on the image of the Constitution in the minds of future genera¬
tions, particularly on historians and political scientists who have
an innate fondness for theoretical symmetry. Yet, while the shades
of Locke and Montesquieu may have been hovering in the back¬
ground, and the delegates may have been unconscious instruments
of a transcendent telos, the careful observer of the day-to-day
work of the Convention finds no over-arching principles. The
“separation of powers” to him seems to be a by-product of sus¬
picion, and “federalism” he views as a pis alter, as the farthest
point the delegates felt they could go in the destruction of state
power without themselves inviting repudiation.
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 469
To conclude, the Constitution was neither a victory for abstract
theory nor a great practical success. Well over half a million men
had to die on the battlefields of the Civil Wax before certain
constitutional principles could be defined—a baleful consideration
which is somehow overlooked in our customary tributes to the
farsighted genius of the Framers and to the supposed American
talent for “constitutionalism.” The Constitution was, however, a
vivid demonstration of effective democratic political action, and
of the forging of a national elite which literally persuaded its
countrymen to hoist themselves by their own boot straps. Ameri¬
can pro-consuls would be wise not to translate the Constitution
into Japanese, or Swahili, or treat it as a work of semi-Divine
origin; but when students of comparative politics examine the
process of nation-building in countries newly freed from colonial
rule they may find the American experience instructive as a
classic example of the potentialities of a democratic elite.
The Theory of Human Nature
in the American Constitution
and the Method of Counterpoise
ARTHUR O. LOVE JOY
... In the late seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century
man (as Vauvenargues put it) “was in disgrace with all thinking
men” in the Western world—or at least with most of those who
wrote disquisitions in prose or verse concerning him. He was
described as a being actuated always by nonrational motives—by
“passions,” or arbitrary and unexamined prejudices, or vanity, or
the quest of private economic advantage—and yet as always in¬
wardly and incorrigibly assured that his motives were rational.
When human nature was so conceived, it might naturally have
been inferred that men were hopeless material for the construc¬
tion of a peaceful, smoothly working, stable, and just political
system, in which these diverse, conflicting, purely personal moti-
Reprinted with permission from Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), 37—65.
47 <> REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
vations would constantly be voluntarily subordinated to, and even
made contributory to, “the general good.” And such a view of
human nature might well have appeared most of all incompatible
with a scheme of government in which ultimate political power
would be, through a wide (though still far from universal) exten¬
sion of the franchise, placed in the hands of a multitude of
individuals or groups prompted by such irrational and irrecon¬
cilable passions and prejudices. How could you build a safe, solid,
and enduring structure out of bricks in which there were forces
impelling them perpetually to push in different directions and to
collide with one another? Yet it was precisely in the later eight¬
eenth century that the scheme of “republican” government won
the advocacy of political philosophers of immense influence in
their time and made its first decisive advances; and (this is the
particular fact relevant to our general subject which I wish to
point out here) it was just at this time that the American Consti¬
tution was framed under the leadership of a group of extraordi¬
narily able men who had few illusions about the rationality of the
generality of mankind—who, in short, held in the main the theory
of human nature and human motivations which was set forth
in the preceding lecture.
This fact (for which I shall presently give some of the evi¬
dence) has the look of a paradox; but it is in large part (I do
not say wholly) explained by the wide currency in the late
seventeenth and the eighteenth century of two other conceptions,
not hitherto mentioned, which implied that it is entirely possible
to construct an ideal political society out of bad human materials
—to frame a rational scheme of government, in which the general
good will be realized, without presupposing that the individuals
who exercise ultimate political power will be severally actuated
in their use by rational motives, or primarily solicitous about the
general good. Of these two conceptions, I shall try to elucidate
and illustrate the first, which is the simpler and less far-reaching,
in the present lecture. . . .
Although philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen¬
turies, when discoursing on the divine government of the world,
often declared it to be axiomatic that the Creator always accom¬
plishes his ends by the simplest and most direct means, they
also tended to assume that he is frequently under the necessity
of employing what may be called the method of counterpoise—
accomplishing desirable results by balancing harmful things
against one another. This was illustrated in the admirable con¬
trivance on which popular expositions of the Newtonian celestial
mechanics liked to dwell, whereby the planets had within them
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 471
a centrifugal force which alone would have made them fly off into
space in straight lines, and a centripetal force, which alone would
have caused them to fall into the sun; happily counterbalancing
one another, these two otherwise mischievous forces cause these
bodies to behave as they should, that is, to roll round in their
proper orbits. And human nature was increasingly conceived after
the analogy of such a mechanical system. Voltaire proposed to
amend the famous dictum of Descartes: “God, whom he called
the eternal geometer, and whom I call the eternal mechanician
(machiniste); and the passions are the wheels which make all
these machines go.” 1 The place of the method of counterpoise in
the dynamics of human nature had been tersely pointed out by
Pascal before 1660: “We do not sustain ourselves in a state of
virtue by our own force, but by the counterpoise of two opposite
faults, just as we stand upright between two contrary winds;
remove one of these faults, we fall into the other.” 2 La Roche¬
foucauld used a different simile to express the same conception:
"The vices enter into the composition of the virtues as poisons
enter into the composition of remedies. Prudence assembles and
tempers them and makes them serve usefully against the evils
of life.” 3
And the creator of a state, like the Creator of the universe and
of man—and, in fact, as a consequence of this favorite method of
the Author of Nature—must accomplish his lesser but beneficent
design by pitting against one another forces (that is, human
motives) which, taken separately, are disruptive or otherwise bad,
or at the least nonmoral—since no other forces, no rational and
virtuous motives, can be relied upon. He must harness together
and counterbalance contrary defects and competing egoisms. It
had been laid down by the judicious Hooker, in the earliest classic
of English political thought, that
Laws politic, ordained for external order, are never framed as they
should be, unless, presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate,
rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his
x Bieu et les hommes; cf. also Traite de Metaphysique, 1734, Ch. VUI. For
an example of the parallel of celestial and political mechanics, cf. Montes¬
quieu, Be VEsprit des lois , Bk. Ill, ch. vii: "Ambition,” or the desire for
"honor,” which is the "principle” of the monarchical form of government,
"moves all the parts of the body politic; it unites them by its own action,
and the result is that each individual serves the public interest while he
believes that he is serving his own. . . . You might say that it is like
the system of the universe, in which there is a force which incessantly
moves all bodies away from the centre and a force of gravity which brings
them back to it.”
2 Pensees, ed. Giraud, No. 359.
s Maximes, 182.
472 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nature; unless, in a word, presuming man to be in regard of Ms de¬
praved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide
notwithstanding so to frame Ms outward actions that they be no hin¬
drance unto the common good for wMch societies are instituted: unless
they do tMs, they are not perfect. 4
TMs at least stated the problem: how, by means of what political
device, could you bring creatures whose wills were always moved
by irrational and “depraved” passions to behave in ways wMch
would not be inconsistent with the “common good”? There were
several proposed solutions to the problem; the one which here
concerns us and which was to play an extremely influential part
in eighteenth-century political thinking was the method of coun¬
terpoise. It was set forth in 1714 in doggerel verse by the very
injudicious Mandevifle. As was his custom, he put it in the most
violendy paradoxical form, describing a well-ordered state in
which,
Though every part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.
Such were the Blessings of that State,
Their Crimes conspired to make them great . . .
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the Common Good.
TMs was the State’s Craft that maintained
The Whole of which each part complain’d:
This, as in Musick Harmony,
Made jarrings in the main agree. 5
But the textbook—though it was a very confused textbook—on
the theory of human nature which was most widely read and
admired in the middle decades of the eighteenth century was
provided by Alexander Pope. Every well-educated Englishman of
the period, in Britain and America, was acquainted with the
Essay on Man, and many of them doubtless knew its most famous
lines by heart. And one thesis concerning the modus operand! of
volition and the motivation of all of men’s actions which the
poem set forth, especially in the Second Epistle, was essentially
the same as that in the lines which I have quoted from The Fable
of the Bees, though more elegantly expressed. 6 For Pope, too,
“statecraft” consisted in the recognition and application of the
*Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity , I (Everyman's Library ed., p. 188).
5 The Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, I, p. 24.
6 On the question of Pope's acquaintance with The Fable of the Bees, see
the Introduction to A. Hamilton Thompson's edition of the Essay on Man,
1913, p. xi. Mr. Thompson concludes that “it is certain that Pope knew
Mandeville’s book," and that it “furnished a prominent portion of the argu¬
ment of the Second Epistle."
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 473
two premises underlying the political method of counterpoise:
that men never act from disinterested and rational motives, but
that it is possible, none the less, to fashion a good "whole,” a
happy and harmonious State, by skillfully mixing and counter¬
balancing these refractory and separately antagonistic parts.
Since the Essay on Man is, I fear, much less familiar in the
twentieth than it was in the eighteenth century, it is perhaps
advisable to bring together here the principal passages illustrating
the summary which I have just given. Men’s actions, Pope de¬
clares, are always prompted by their passions, not by their reason.
The latter, it is true, has an important part as a factor in human
behavior, but it is an ancillary part. It enables us to judge of the
means by which the passions, which are all "Modes of Self-Love,”
can be gratified, but it has no driving power.
On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail.
Reason’s the card, but Passion is the gale. 7
The card (i.e., compass) neither propels the ship nor determines
the direction in which it is to sail; it merely enables the mariner
to know in which direction it is moving, or in what direction to
steer in order to reach the port he desires. And the passions,
which thus provide the sole dynamic factor in human behavior,
are not only diverse but antagonistic to one another. Every indi¬
vidual’s will is dominated by some obsessing "Master Passion,”
which is the "mind’s disease”:
Reason itself but gives it edge and pow’r.
As Heaven’s blest beam turns vinegar more sour. 8
That is one half of Pope’s picture of the working of human moti¬
vations; but there is another half. Though these conflicting pas¬
sions cannot be got rid of, they can be so combined and made to
counteract one another that the total result will be social peace
and order; and this was the purpose of the Creator in making
man:
Passions, like elements, tho’ bom to fight.
Yet, mix’d and soften’d, in His work unite:
These, ’tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes Man, can Man destroy? . . .
Each individual seeks a sev’ral goal.
But Heav’ns great view is one, and that the whole.
That, counterworks each folly and caprice,
That, disappoints th’ effect of every vice. 9
7 Epistle H, 107-108.
8 Epistle H, 147-148.
*Ibid. y 111 ff., 235 if.
474 reinterpretation of the American revolution
Thus the statesman’s task is to carry out this divine purpose by
so adjusting the parts of "the whole” that "jarring interests” will
of themselves create
Th’ according music of the well-mixed State.
By this means it will be possible for him to
build on wants, and on defects of mind.
The joy, the peace, the glory of mankind. 10
To achieve this great end, in short, it is not at all necessary to
assume that man is controlled by his reason; it is, on the contrary,
necessary to assume that he is not—since that is the fact about
him.
Two decades later, probably borrowing some of these ideas
from Pope, the poet laureate of the time, William Whitehead,
included a syncopated version of them in his poem "The En¬
thusiast”;
[God] bids the tyrant passions rage.
He bids them war eternal wage,
And combat each his foe.
Till from dissensions concords rise.
And beauties from deformities.
And happiness from woe.
Vauvenargues wrote in 1746: "If it is true that one cannot elimi¬
nate vice, the science of those who govern consists in making it
contribute to the common good.” And Helvetius, later in the
century, more diffusely versifies a particular form of the same
general conception: every man always pursues his private inter¬
est, but the art of government lies in contriving an artificial
identification of private with public interest—or at least, in per¬
suading men that the two are identical:
Le grand art de regner, TAit du Legislateur,
Veut que chaque mortel qui sous ses lois s’enchaine,
En suivant le penchant ou son plaisir rentraine.
10 The last two quotations are from Epistles III, 239-244 and II, 247—248.
The group of passages brought together above constitute the one consistent
and coherent argument, on the subject with which this lecture is concerned,
that is to be found in the Essay. But it must be added, and emphasized, that
there are other passages inconsistent with them and with one another in
that highly confused poem; these are chiefly due to Pope’s timidity about
assigning to that traditionally venerated faculty, the Reason, the subordinate
and all-but-impotent role which was essential for his principal argument
and was, as shown above, frequently insisted upon by him in the most un¬
equivocal terms. His waverings and contradictions on this matter have been
well pointed out by Thompson, op. cit., p. 63, n. 197.
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 475
Ne puisse faire un pas qu’il ne marche a la fois
Vers le bonheur public, le chef-d'oeuvre des lois.
Selon qu'un Potentat est plus ou moins habile
A former, combiner cet Art si difficile,
TYn rrir et d'attacher, par un lien commun
A Finteret de tous Finteret de chacun,
Selon que bien ou mal il fonde la justice.
I/on cherit les vertus ou Ton se livre au vice. 11
Bearing in mind these earlier statements of the two presup¬
positions of the method of counterpoise, as applied to the problem
of government, we are now ready to turn back to what happened
in Philadelphia in 1787 and, I think, to understand somewhat
better what it was that then happened. To any reader of The
Federalist it should be evident—though apparently it sometimes
has not been—that the chief framers of the Constitution of the
United States, who had been reared in the climate of opinion of
the mid-eighteenth century, accepted the same two presuppositions
and sought to apply them, for the first time in modem history,
in the actual and detailed planning of a system of government
not yet in existence. The ablest members of the Constitutional
Convention were well aware that their task—unlike that of the
Continental Congress of 1776—was not to lay down abstract
principles of political philosophy, not to rest the system they were
constructing simply upon theorems about the “natural rights” of
men or of States, though they postulated such rights. Their
problem was not chiefly one of political ethics but of practical
psychology, a need not so much to preach to Americans about
what they ought to do, as to predict successfully what they would
do, supposing certain governmental mechanisms were (or were
not) established. Unless these predictions were in the main
correct, the Constitution would fail to accomplish the ends for
which it was designed. And the predictions could be expected to
prove correct only if they were based upon what—in the eyes of
the chief proponents and defenders of the Constitution—seemed
a sound and realistic theory of human nature.
That theory was unmistakably set forth in what has come
to be the most famous of the Federalist papers (No. X), written
by James Madison, the member of the Convention who is, I sup¬
pose, now generally admitted to deserve, if any one member can
be said to deserve, the title of “Father of the Constitution.” 12
Since, however, it would be unsafe to assume that the argument
u Helvetius, Poesies , 1781, p. Ill: “£pitre sur le plaisir.”
^See the notable volume of Irving Brant, James Madison , Father of the
Constitution , 1950, especially pp. 154-155.
47$ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
even of this celebrated essay is now familiar to most Americans,
let me briefly summarize it, mostly in Madison’s words- "The
great menace,” he writes, "to governments on the popular model”
is "the spirit of faction.” By a "faction,” he explains he means
"a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a
minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some
common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights
of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of
the community.” There are two conceivable "methods of curing
the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes, the
other, by controlling its effects.” The first method, however, is
wholly inconsistent with popular government; you could abolish
factions only by totally abolishing the 'liberty” of individual
citizens, i.e., their exercise, through the franchise, of the right
severally to express and to seek to realize their own opinions and
wishes with respect to the policies and acts of the government.
But to expect that their exercise of that right will be, in general,
determined by anything but what we now call "special interests”
—which is what Madison chiefly meant by "the spirit of faction” 13
—is to expect an impossible transformation of human nature.
"As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at
liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” And "as
long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-
love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence
upon each other. ... A division of society into different interests
and parties” will therefore be inevitable. Since, then, "the latent
causes of faction are sown in the nature of man,” the “indirect
and remote considerations” which are necessary to "adjust these
clashing interests and render them all subservient to the public
good will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one
party has in disregarding the rights of another or the good of
the whole.”
But though the "causes” cannot be eliminated, the "effects” of
the spirit of faction can be "controlled.” How? By making sure,
Madison answers, that the number and relative strength of the
groups representing conflicting special interests will be such that
rTI he . Vision 9 * which Madison regarded as the chief source of the “spirit
ot taction is economic self-interest. He was a pioneer of the conception
ot political smuggles as, often disguised, class conflicts, and of economic
<tetermimsin. But (unlike Marx) he also (to borrow Mr. Brant’s summary on
this point) “recognized the influence of differing opinions in religion, con¬
trary theories of government, attachment to rival leaders, and many other
pomts which stir the human passions and drive men into 'mutual ani¬
mosities. (James Madison, Father of the Constitution , p. 173).
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 477
they will effectually counterbalance one another. When they do
so, no part will be able to dominate the whole, to use all the legis¬
lative and executive power of the government for its own pur¬
poses. Each faction will be unable to get a majority vote in favor
of its special interest because all the other factions will be opposed
to it, and thereby (Madison assumes) the "general good,” or the
nearest practicable approximation to it, will be realized.
In thus invoking the method of counterpoise as the solvent
of the (for him) crucial problem of political theory, Madison was
at the same time defending one of the chief practical contentions
of the group in the Convention of which he was the leader. The
question at issue, as he formulates it in Federalist No. X, was
"whether small or extensive republics are most favorable to the
public weal”; but this question did not imply that there was any
conflict of opinion as to the number of states which it was desir¬
able to include in the new Union. No one proposed the actual
exclusion from membership of any of the former thirteen colonies
which were willing to ratify the Constitution. The real issue con¬
cerned the apportionment of legislative authority between the
national government and the States. And (at this time) Madison
was an extreme advocate of “national supremacy”; 14 the States
should, of course, have power to make laws on strictly and obvi¬
ously local concerns, but “in all cases to which the separate States
are incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States
may be interrupted by individual legislation,” 15 that power (and
adequate means to enforce its decisions) should be assigned to
the Federal Congress. By an “extensive republic,” then, Madison
means one of this centralized sort.
As to the choice between “small” and “extensive” republics,
Madison, in Federalist No. X, argues vigorously in favor of the
latter, mainly on the ground that it alone would ensure an ade¬
quate counterbalancing of the political power of the groups repre¬
senting regional (which, as he recognizes, were in America often
also economic) special interests. “The smaller the society, the
fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests com¬
posing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more
frequently will a majority be found of the same party, and . . .
the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of
14 This has been conclusively shown by Mr. Brant, cf. op. cit., pp. 24-25,
30—36, 60—61, and passim.
15 The phrasing here is that of the “Virginia Plan.” See Brant, op. cit ., pp.
24-25. This (as Brant has pointed out), though presented by Randolph, was
merely an “echo” of Madison’s proposals.
478 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
oppression.” But if all these clashing factions are pitted against
one another in a single legislative body, it is unlikely that any
one of them will be strong enough to carry through any such
“oppressive” designs. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a
greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable
that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade
the rights of other citizens.” “Extending the sphere” meant for
Madison, it is evident, increasing both the number of groups
participating in the central legislative authority and the number
of subjects (touching more than merely local interests) on which
it may legislate. The more “extended” it is de jure, the more re¬
stricted will be its power de facto. The decisive “advantage,” in
short, “of a large over a small republic” will “consist in the greater
obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret
wishes of an unjust and interested majority.”
All this should be sufficient to justify the conclusion which
I earlier propounded in advance of the proof of it, i.e., that the
fundamental political philosophy of Madison (at this time) in¬
cluded two crucial propositions: (1) that the political opinions
and activities of individuals will, with perhaps the rarest excep¬
tions, always be determined by personal motives at variance with
the general or “public” interest—in short, by bad motives; but
(2) that, in framing a political constitution, you can construct
a good whole out of bad parts, can make these conflicting private
interests subservient to the public interest, simply by bringing all
of them together upon a common political battleground where
they will neutralize one another.
It has seemed to me worth while to present evidence for the
first point at considerable length because there appears to be a
still widely prevalent belief among Americans that the Founding
Fathers were animated by a “faith in the people,” a confidence
in the wisdom of “the common man.” This belief, to use the
terminology of the logic books, is a grandiose example of the
fallacy of division. For Madison, as we have seen—and in this
he probably did not differ from the majority of his colleagues in
the Convention—had no “faith in the people” as individuals acting
in their political capacity. It is true that he recognized certain
political rights of individual citizens—primarily the right to vote
(with the large exceptions, inter alia, of women and Negroes)
and to seek public office. It is also true that he sincerely believed,
as apparently did many of his colleagues, that they themselves
were disinterestedly constructing a scheme of government which
would make for the good of the people as a whole and in the long
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 479
run. 16 But “the people” as voters, the total electorate, was made
up wholly of “factions,” i.e., of individuals combined into rival
political groups or parties; and a faction always strives to accom¬
plish ends “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the
permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” “Faith in
the people” is plainly and vigorously repudiated in Federalist No.
X. But what Madison did have faith in was the efficacy, and
probable adequacy, of the method of counterpoise as a corrective
of the evils otherwise inevitably resulting from “government on
the popular model,” a “republican remedy for the diseases most
incident to republican government.”
One fundamental thesis in this lecture, the learned reader
will note, precisely contradicts a historical generalization set forth
in a celebrated, learned and brilliantly written book by a recent
American historian. Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth-Century Philosophers offers an enumeration of “four
essential articles of the religion of the Enlightenment”; two of
these articles are: “(1) Man is not natively depraved; ... (3)
Man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experi¬
ence, of perfecting the good life on earth. . . . The Philosophers
. . . knew instinctively that "man in general’ is natively good,
easily enlightened, disposed to follow reason and common sense,
generous and humane and tolerant, easily led by persuasion more
than compelled by force; above all, a good citizen and a man of
virtue.” That there were some writers in the eighteenth century
who would have subscribed to these articles, and that a tendency
to affirm them was increasing, especially in France in the later
decades of the century, is true. That the conception of thg char¬
acter and dominant motives of “man in general” formulated by
Becker in the sentences quoted was held by most, or even by the
most typical and influential, “eighteenth-century philosophers”
is not true; it is a radical historical error. To assume its truth is
to fail to see the most striking feature of the most widely prevalent
opinion about human nature current in the period and to mis¬
apprehend the nature of the peculiar problem with which the
16 This assumption of the disinterestedness of the makers of a Constitution
—their exemption from the motivations controlling the political behavior of
the rest of mankind—was psychologically almost indispensable in the Con¬
vention; certainly, few were likely to admit frankly that their own argu¬
ments were simply expressions of the "spirit of faction.” But that they
usually were so in fact is, I take it, now recognized by all competent his¬
torians; there are, indeed, few better examples of Madison’s thesis—the
shaping of political opinions by private, class, or sectional interests—than
are to be found in the debates of the Convention.
480 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
“enlightened” and innovating political and social theorists and
statesmen of that age were dealing. The question here, of course,
like all historical questions, is one to be settled chiefly by docu¬
mentary evidence; and it is partly for that reason that I have cited
the ipsissima verba of the designers of our own Constitution. To
these let us now return.
It is not solely in his argument on the division of powers be¬
tween the national and state government, in the tenth Federalist
paper, that Madison rests his case upon the two propositions of
which I have been speaking. In his defense of all the major
provisions of the Constitution concerning the internal structure
of the national government itself—its division into three depart¬
ments (legislative, executive, and judicial), the division of the
legislature into two houses, the whole scheme of “checks and
balances”—the same two premises are fundamental and decisive.
When Madison undertakes to justify the separation of the Federal
government into three mutually independent departments, his
distrust of human nature and his conception of the way to offset
its defects in planning a system of government are even more
sharply expressed than in No. X. I hope those who are familiar
with the text of The Federalist will forgive me for quoting from
it at some length, for the benefit of those to whom it is not
familiar:
The great security against a gradual concentration of the several
powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who admin¬
ister each department the necessary means, and personal motives, to
resist the encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must
in this case, as in all others, be made commensurate to the danger of
attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interests
of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the
place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices
should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is
government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
. . . The policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defects
of better motives might be traced through the whole system of human
affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in
all the subordinate distribution of power; where the constant aim is
• * • that the private interest of every individual may be sentinel over
the public interest. 17
17 The Federalist, No. LI; italics m i n e. Long attributed to Hamilton, this
paper is now known to have been written by Madison; cf. Brant, op. cit.,
pp. 184 and 486, n. 12. It should be mentioned that in a single sentence in
this essay Madison writes: “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the
primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
ARTHUR O. LOVEJOT 481
And this policy, Madison declares, is completely exemplified in
the Constitution, which was then awaiting ratification.
In the Federal Republic of the United States, whilst all authority
in it will be derived from, and dependent on the society, the society
itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of
citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be
in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a
free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as
that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity
of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree
of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and
sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country
and the number of people comprehended under the same government. 18
In short, the bigger the country (“provided it lies within a prac¬
ticable sphere”), the greater the assurance that “a coalition of the
majority of the whole society could seldom take place upon any
other principles than those of justice and the general good.” It
must be remembered that, in Madison’s opinion, no coalition based
upon these principles is likely except, perhaps, in times of grave
national danger. Under such circumstances, there may be virtu¬
ally universal agreement as to the measures necessary to avert
the danger. But under normal conditions, the people will always
be divided into factions, and it is essential that no faction—in
other words, no fraction of the people—shall ever obtain a ma¬
jority in the legislature. This, however, can easily be prevented
by means of the counterposition of the factions to one another.
Madison’s thesis here, then, may be summed up thus: The
whole people has the sole right to rule, but no mere majority,
however large, has that right. This seems a political paradox; but
as actually applied—primarily, in the situation confronting the
Convention itself—it resulted in the adoption of a series of
compromises with which no faction was wholly satisfied, but
which all, after much wrangling, were willing to accept, faute de
mieux. Being under the practical necessity of arriving at some
agreement, they reached a reluctant unanimity (barring a few
necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Rut this seems no more than a prudent
recognition of the fact that the general mass of voters possesses ultimate
political power; and what Madison thought of "the people,” in this sense,
we have already seen. His chief concern was to prove the indispensability of
the "auxiliary precautions.” For the full presentation of the evidence that
No. I, II, and the two preceding and seven following Federalist papers were
composed by Madison, see Edward G. Bourne's study, “The Authorship of the
Federalist” in his Essays in Historical Criticism, 1901.
18 Ibid.
4 B 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
irreconcilable individuals) made necessary by the approximate
counterbalancing of the conflicting groups and interests repre¬
sented. And when embodied in the Constitution, these compro¬
mises for a time—though with steadily increasing tensions—
worked; they held the Union together for more than seventy
years. In this sense, and to this extent, Madison's theoretical
principles may be said to have been pragmatically vindicated.
Lest it be supposed that faith in the method of counterpoise
was peculiar to Madison among the members of the Convention,
let me cite one more example from a member very different in
temperament and character and in many of his opinions on
specific issues. In the discussion of the powers of the "second
branch" of the Federal legislature—i.e., the Senate—Gouvemeur
Morris delivered a characteristic speech in which he declared that
the essential function of such a second chamber is "to check the
precipitation, changeableness and excesses of the first branch."
But "what qualities axe necessary to constitute a check in this
case? . . . The checking branch must have a personal interest in
checking the other branch. One interest must be opposed to
another interest. Vices as they exist must be turned against each
other. Morris regarded the Senate—whose members, he thought,
should hold office for life—as representing the interest of the
propertied class. Doubtless, "the rich will strive to establish their
dominion and to enslave the rest. They always did; they always
will. The proper security against them is to form them into a
separate interest. The two forces will then control each other. By
thus combining and setting apart the aristocratic interest, the
popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a
mutual security." As the body representative of those who have
"great personal property," the Senate will "love to lord it through
pride. Pride is indeed, the great principle that actuates the poor
and the rich. It is this principle which in the former resists, in
the latter abuses, authority." 19
But though Morris here voiced the same opinion of human
motives that we have seen expressed by Madison and also, in
order to offset the absence of "better motives," relied upon the
counterbalancing of bad ones, he was in fact employing partially
identical premises to support a different conclusion. For Madison,
when writing in The Federalist , assumed that there would always
be a “multiplicity" of such special interests and that the numerical
pp W] 270f S Debates 071 tbe Ad °P Uon of the Federal Constitution, V (1870),
ARTHUR O. LOVE JOY 483
ratios of the groups severally supporting them, or of their repre¬
sentatives in Congress, would be such that no coalition of them
could ever obtain a majority. 20 But Morris—at least when making
this speech—recognized only two permanently opposed forces in
politics, the rich and the poor. And he cannot, of course, have
supposed that these two would usually, or, indeed, ever, numer¬
ically counterbalance one another. They must therefore be made
equal in legislative power—or, more precisely, in legislative im¬
potence—by a specific constitutional provision; one of the Houses
of Congress must be reserved for men having great wealth and
the “aristocratic spirit,” an American analogue of the House of
Lords. True, Morris grants—human nature being what it is—
such a body will always be inimical to the interests of “the rest,”
the nonpropertied classes. It is therefore necessary to have another
chamber representative of the latter, to hold in check the former.
But it is not in this latter consideration that Morris seems chiefly
interested. What he wished to ensure was the protection of the
vested interests of large property-holders. And he saw that the
method of counterpoise, especially in the form which he proposed,
was perfectly adapted to the accomplishment of this end. For
the effect of that method, when applied to a legislative body,
20 Why Madison made this assumption may seem at first hard to under¬
stand; he writes as if he, like Pope, accepted as evident beyond the need
of proof the assumption that “jarring interests” will “of themselves create
th’ according music of the weU-mix’d State”—though Madison adds, in sub¬
stance, that they will not be well-mixed unless the mixture comprises all of
them, in an “extensive republic.” As a generalization the assumption was
certainly not self-evident, nor particularly probable. But in fact Madison
had specific reasons for the assumption, which he set forth in his speech
in the Convention on June 28, 1787. He was then arguing (unsuccessfully,
as it turned out) in favor of giving to the larger states more Senators than
to the small states. To the objection that this would enable the larger states
to combine to dominate the smaller ones, he replied that this could happen
only if the larger states had common “interests,” which they did not have.
The three largest were Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. These
were remote from one another; they differed in “customs, manners, and
religion”; and, still more important, their trade interests were entirely
“diverse.” “Where,” then, “is the probability of a combination? What the
inducements?” Thus, it will be seen, Madison was here asserting an actual
existing counterpoise of political forces in the Federal Union: where there
is no identity of economic and other interests, there can be no “coalition,”
and therefore no majority in Congress for any one group. But since the
proposal of unequal state representation in the Senate failed to carry, he
turned, in the Federalist , to another and less specific argument: be the
states equally or unequally represented in the “second chamber,” there would
in any case be a natural counterbalancing of voting strength among such
a “multiplicity” of sections and economic interests and religious sects. And
though Madison now gave no definite or cogent reasons for believing this
to be true, it was true, subject to the qualifications above noted.
484 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
would be—as Madison’s arguments said—to prevent any one of
the opposing factions from ever accomplishing its purpose. A
Senate that was representative exclusively of one economic class
would never concur in any measure affecting class interests
passed by a House that was representative of other classes. And
it followed that "the poor” could never get a law passed which
would be unfavorable to the economic interests of "the rich.” 21
Thus the method of counterpoise could, without relinquishment
of its two essential premises, be proposed as a means to the
realization of quite different designs with respect to the distribu¬
tion of legislative power. But, whatever the purpose for which
it might be advocated, it obviously could have only negative ef¬
fects. It was simply a way of preventing new proposals from being
adopted. If it ever became completely effective (which, of course,
it never quite did), it could result only in a deadlock, an equi¬
librium of forces in which no movement in any direction would
be possible. It therefore tended to crystallize the status quo and
was naturally favored by those who wished to keep the existing
political and economic order unchanged—or as little changed as
possible. It was a device of conservatives to block innovations.
Yet it could hardly be openly argued for upon traditionally con¬
servative grounds—e.g., upon the assumption that change is in
itself a bad thing or that the "aristocratic” and propertied class
is wiser than, and morally superior to, the ‘lower classes.” For
it rested, as we have seen, upon the generalization that (certainly
in politics) the aims and motives of virtually all individuals, and
therefore of all "factions,” are equally irrational and "interested,”
equally indifferent to the "general good”; and it was only upon
this assumption that the scheme of equipoise, of rendering all
factions equally impotent, could be consistently defended.
But this generalization, though indispensable to the argument,
fl Madison, in spite of Ids usual argument based upon the existing multi¬
plicity of interests and factions, recognized, like Morris, that the most serious
conflict within the Union was that between only two factions; but for him,
this was not a conflict between “the rich” and “the poor,” but between two
major sections of the country. In a memorably prophetic speech on June
29th he warned the Convention that “the great danger to our general gov¬
ernment is, the great southern and northern interests being opposed to each
other. Look to the votes in Congress [i.e., of the Confederation], and most of
them stand divided by the geography of the country, not according to the
size of die States.” This supreme danger he hoped and believed could be
averted by means of a balance of power in Congress between the two sec¬
tions. So long as, by various compromises, that balance seemed to remain
approximately undisturbed, Madison’s hope was realized. As soon as the
balance was patently overthrown, the danger which he pointed out became
a tragic reality.
ARTHUR O. UOVEJOY 485
had some awkward consequences. It implied that, in political
discussion and agitation, appeals to purely ethical standards and
rational and disinterested ideals would be inappropriate and use¬
less, since, by hypothesis, no such appeal could really influence
the opinions and actions of the voters or legislators. But in prac¬
tice such moral, or ostensibly moral, appeals were not entirely
ineffective; and, once organized political parties were actually
operating, their orators seldom, if ever, admitted that the policies
they advocated were adverse "to the - rights of others and the
good of the whole”; on the contrary, they usually represented
these policies as consistent with, or even required by, the highest
moral principles, and they doubtless often believed this to be
true. And though this usually was—and still is—simply "ration¬
alization,” even a rationalization is an admission that rational
considerations, valid by criteria which are more than biases aris¬
ing from private interests or from unexamined and unverifiable
preconceptions, are relevant to the issue under discussion. How¬
ever small the part which such considerations really play in the
determination of individual opinions and individual behavior, as
soon as you admit their relevance, and profess to justify your
own contentions by them, you have accepted a change of venue
to another and admittedly a higher court, in which the contro¬
versy must be fought out under the rules of that court, that is,
rules of logical consistency and verifiable empirical evidence. In
so far as those who invoked the method of counterpoise im¬
plicitly denied even the possibility of such a change of venue,
they ignored a real aspect of the working of human nature in
politics. But in saying this I am far from intending to imply that
their assumptions about men’s usual motivations, in their political
opinions and actions, were false, or even that they were not the
more pertinent and useful assumptions to apply to the immediate
practical problems which confronted the Constitution-makers in
1787.
In these comments on the latent implications, the degree of
validity, and the practical effect of the theory of counterpoise
which so powerfully influenced the framing of the American
Constitution, I have deviated from the primarily historical pur¬
pose of the present lecture. That purpose was not to evaluate but
to illustrate the wide prevalence, even in the later eighteenth
century, of a highly unfavorable appraisal of the motives generally
controlling men’s political (and other) behavior, and to explain
in part the seemingly paradoxical fact that, in the very same
period, the American republic was founded, largely by men who
486 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
accepted that appraisal. This purpose has, I hope, now been
sufficiently accomplished.
But there was, as I have already said, another idea, or complex
of interrelated ideas, about the springs of action in men, which
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was even
more widely prevalent than the conceptions underlying the meth¬
od of counterpoise; and it had a broader scope, and could lead in
part to different conclusions. Both, it is true, were in agreement
on one fundamental premise already familiar to us: the assump¬
tion that man’s "reason” has, at most, a secondary and a very
small influence upon his conduct and that irrational or non-
rational feelings and desires are the real efficient causes of all,
or nearly all, of men’s actions. And there followed from this
assumption the practical corollary that one who wishes to control
men’s "outward conduct”—i.e., by means of a system of govern¬
ment—must do so by employing these nonrational forces, must
(as Pope had said) "build on wants, and on defects of mind” the
social and political structure which he seeks to realize.
Inasmuch as this general assumption underlay both the theory
already expounded—that embodying the principle of counter¬
poise—and what as yet I can only refer to (since it has not yet
been expounded) as the second theory, they may be considered
species of the same genus. And, having thus one fundamental
presupposition in common, they have often been lumped together
as identical—by Pope, among others. But they were actually, in
other respects, extremely dissimilar. Whereas the scheme of
counterpoise, in order to offset the irrational and mutually antag¬
onistic motivations of individuals, relied upon an essentially ex¬
ternal, political, and quasi-mechanical device, the second theory
found in the individual—in all individuals—a certain peculiarly
potent type of motivation which, though admittedly a mode of
self-love and certainly not "rational,” was not necessarily mutually
antagonistic or "adverse to the common good,” but, on the con¬
trary (as many writers maintained, though others denied), con¬
sisted of subjective forces which give rise to socially desirable
"outward conduct,” apart from any external controls. . . .
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 487
That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science:
David Hume, James Madison,
and the Tenth Federalist
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR
In June 1783, the war for American independence being ended.
General Washington addressed his once-famous circular letter
to the state governors with the hopeful prophecy that if the Union
of the States could be preserved, the future of the Republic
would be both glorious and happy. “The foundation of our Empire
was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,
Washington pointed out, “but at an Epocha when the rights of
mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than
at any former period; the researches of the human mind after
social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the treas¬
ures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages,
and Legislators, through a long succession of years, are laid open
for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied
in the Establishment of our forms of Government ... At this
auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a
Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and
happy, the fault will be intirely their own.”
The optimism of General Washington’s statement is manifest;
the reasons he advances for this optimism, however, seem to
modem Americans a century and a half later both odd and*naive,
if not slightly un-American. For Washington here argues in favor
of “the Progress of the Human Mind.” Knowledge gradually ac¬
quired through “researches of the human mind” about the nature
of man and government—knowledge which “the gloomy age of
Ignorance and Superstition” did not have—gives Americans in
1783 the power to new-model their forms of government accord¬
ing to the precepts of wisdom and reason. The “Philosopher” as
Sage and Legislator, General Washington hopes, will preside over
the creation and reform of American political institutions.
Reprinted with permission from the Huntington Library Quarterly , XX, 4
(August, 1057), 343-360. ^
Note: Delivered at the Conference of Early American History at the Henry
E. Huntington Library, February 9, 1957.
488 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
* Philosopher” as written here by Washington was a word with
hopeful and good connotations. But this was 1783. In 1789 the
French Revolution began; by 1792 "philosophy” was being equated
with the guillotine, atheism, the reign of terror. Thereafter
philosopher” would be a smear-word, connoting a fuzzy-minded
and dangerous social theorist—one of those impractical Utopians
whose foolish attempts to reform society according to a rational
plan created the anarchy and social disaster of the Terror. Before
his death in 1799 Washington himself came to distrust and fear
the political activities of philosophers. And in time it would be¬
come fashionable among both French conservatives and among
all patriotic Americans to stress the sinister new implications
of the word "philosophy” added after 1789 and to credit the
French philosophers with transforming the French Revolution
into a had revolution in contrast to the "good” non-philosophical
American Revolution. But this ethical transformation of the word
still lay in the future in 1783. Then "philosophy” and "philoso-
pher” were still terms evoking optimism and hopes of the high
tide of Enlightenment on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary helps us understand why Wash¬
ington had such high regard for philosophy as our war for inde¬
pendence ended. Philosophy,” according to the lexicographer,
was ‘knowledge natural or moral”; it was "hypothesis or system
upon which natural effects are explained.” "To philosophize,” or
play the philosopher,” was "to search into nature; to enquire into
the causes of effects.” The synonym of "Philosophy” in 1783 then
was Science ; the synonym of "Philosopher” would be our modem
word (not coined until 1840) "Scientist,” "a man deep in knowl¬
edge, either moral or natural.”
Bacon, Newton, and Locke were the famed trinity of represent¬
ative great philosophers for Americans and all educated inhabi¬
tants of Western Europe in 1783. Francis Bacon, the earliest
prophet of philosophy as a program for the advancement of learn¬
ing, had preached that "Knowledge is Power” and that Truth
discovered by Reason through observation and free inquiry is as
certain and as readily adapted to promote the happiness of human
lire as Tmth communicated to mankind through God’s direct
revelation. Isaac Newton, "the first luminary in this bright con¬
stellation,” had demonstrated that Reason indeed could discover
the laws of physical Nature and of Nature’s God, while John
Lockes researches into psychology and human understanding
had definitely channeled inquiry toward the discovery of the im¬
mutable and universal laws of Human Nature. By the middle
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 489
of the eighteenth century a multitude of researchers in all the
countries of Europe were seeking, in Newtonian style, to advance
the bounds of knowledge in politics, economics, law, and soci¬
ology. By the middle of the century the French judge and philo-
sophe Montesquieu had produced a compendium of the behavioral
sciences, cutting across all these fields in his famous study of
The Spirit of the Laws,
However, Washington’s assurance that already scientific knowl¬
edge about government had accumulated to such an extent that
it could be immediately applied to the uses of “Legislators,”
pointed less toward France than toward Scotland. There, espe¬
cially in the Scottish universities, had been developed the chief
centers of eighteenth-century social science research and publi¬
cation in all the world. The names of Francis Hutcheson, David
Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Lord Karnes, Adam Ferguson,
the most prominent of the Scottish philosophers, were interna¬
tionally famous. In America the treatises of these Scots, dealing
with history, ethics, politics, economics, psychology, and juris¬
prudence in terms of “system upon which natural effects are
explained,” had become the standard textbooks of the colleges
of the late colonial period. At Princeton, at William and Mary, at
Pennsylvania, at Yale, at King’s, and at Harvard, the young men
who rode off to war in 1776 had been trained in the texts of
Scottish social science.
The Scottish system, as it had been gradually elaborated in
the works of a whole generation of researchers, rested on one
basic assumption, had developed its own special method, and
kept to a consistent aim. The assumption was “that there is a
great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and
ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its prin¬
ciples and operations. The same motives always produce the same
actions; the same events follow from the same causes. . . . Would
you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the
Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the
French and English . . —thus David Hume, presenting the basis
of a science of human behavior. The method of eighteenth-century
social science followed from this primary assumption—it was
historical-comparative synthesis. Again Hume: "Mankind are so
much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us
of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only
to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature,
by showing men in all varieties and situations, and furnishing us
with materials from which we may form our observations and
490 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and
behavior.” 1 Finally, the aim of studying man’s behavior in its
comparative-historical manifestations was for the purpose of
prediction—philosophy would aid the legislator in making correct
policy decisions. Comparative-historical studies of man in society
would allow the discovery of the constant and universal principle
of human nature, which, in turn, would allow at least some safe
predictions about the effects of legislation "almost as general
and certain . . . as any which the mathematical sciences will
afford us.” "Politics” (and again the words are Hume’s) to some
degree "may be reduced to a science.”
By thus translating the abstract generalizations about "philos¬
ophy” in Washington’s letter of 1783 into the concrete and
particular type of philosophy to which he referred, the issue is
brought into new focus more congenial to our modem under¬
standing. On reviewing the specific body of philosophical theory
and writing with which Washington and his American contem¬
poraries were familiar, we immediately remember that "the
collected wisdom” of at least some of the Scottish academic
philosophers was applied to American legislation during the nine¬
teenth century. It is obvious, for example, that the "scientific
predictions,” based on historical analysis, contained in Professor
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), concerning the role of free
enterprise and economic productivity, was of prime significance
in shaping the relations of the state with the American business
community, especially after 1828. Washington’s expectations of
1783 were thus accurate in the long-run view. 2
x David Hume, “Of Liberty and Necessity,” in An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (London, 1748). An examination of the social theory
of the Scottish school is to be found in Gladys Bryson, Man and Society:
The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945). Miss
Bryson seems unaware both of the position held by Scottish social science
in the curriculum of the American colleges after 1750—Princeton, for
example, where nine members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787
graduated, was a provincial carbon-copy, under President Witherspoon, of
Edinburgh—and of its influence on the revolutionary generation. For a
b rillian t analysis of Francis Hutcheson’s ideas and his part in setting the
tone and direction of Scottish research, as well as the trans-Atlantic flow of
ideas between Scotland and the American colonies in the eighteenth century,
with a persuasive explanation of why the Scots specialized in social science
formulations that were peculiarly congenial to the Am erican revolutionary
elite, see Caroline Robbins, “When It Is That Colonies May Turn Inde¬
pendent,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. XI (April, 1954),
pp. 214-251. *
^he theoretical and prophetic nature of Adam Smith’s classic when it was
published in 1776 is today largely ignored by both scholars and spokesmen
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 49 *
It is the purpose of this paper, however, to show that Washing¬
ton’s immediate expectations of the creative role of "philosophy”
in American politics were also accurate in the period in which he
wrote. It is thus the larger inference of the following essay that
"philosophy,” or "the science of politics” (as defined above), was
integral to the whole discussion of the necessity for a more
perfect Union that resulted in the creation of the American
Constitution of 1787.
It can be shown, though not in this short paper, that the use
of history in the debates both in the Philadelphia Convention and
in the state ratifying conventions is not mere rhetorical-historical
window-dressing, concealing substantially greedy motives of class
and property. The speakers were making a genuinely "scientific”
attempt to discover the "constant and universal principles” of any
republican government in regard to liberty, justice, and stability.
In this perspective the three hundred pages of comparative-
historical research in John Adam’s Defence of the Constitutions
of the United States (1787), and the five-hour closely argued
historical analysis in Alexander Hamilton’s Convention Speech of
June 18, 1787, were both "scientific” efforts to relate the current
difficulties of the thirteen American republics to the universal
tendencies of republicanism in all nations and in all ages. History,
scientifically considered, thus helped define both the nature of
the crisis of 1787 for these leaders and their audience, and also
determined in large part the "reforms” that, it could be predicted,
would end the crisis. To both Adams and Hamilton history proved
(so they believed) that sooner or later the American people would
have to return to a system of mixed or limited monarchy—so great
was the size of the country, so diverse were the interests to be
reconciled that no other system could be adequate in securing
both liberty and justice. In like manner Patrick Henry’s prediction,
June 9, 1788, in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, "that one
government [i.e., the proposed constitution] cannot reign over so
extensive a country as this is, without absolute despotism” was
grounded upon a "political axiom” scientifically confirmed, so he
believed, by history.
The most creative and philosophical disciple of the Scottish
school of science and politics in the Philadelphia Convention was
for the modern American business community. In 1776, however. Smith
could only theorize from scattered historical precedents as to how a pro¬
jective free enterprise system might work, because nowhere in his mercan¬
tilist world was a free enterprise system of the sort he described on paper
actually operating.
492 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
James Madison. His effectiveness as an advocate of a new con¬
stitution, and of the particular constitution that was drawn up in
Philadelphia in 1787, was certainly based in large part on his
personal experience in public life and his personal knowledge of
the conditions of America in 1787. But Madison’s greatness as a
statesman rests in part on his ability quite deliberately to set his
limited personal experience in the context of the experience of
men in other ages and times, thus giving extra reaches of insight
to his political formulations.
His most amazing political prophecy, formally published in the
tenth Federalist, was that the size of the United States and its
variety of interests could be made a guarantee of stability and
justice under the new constitution. When Madison made this
prophecy the accepted opinion among all sophisticated politicians
was exactly the opposite. It is the purpose of the following de¬
tailed analysis to show Madison, the scholar-statesman, evolving
his novel theory, and not only using the behavioral science tech-
niques of the eighteenth century, but turning to the writings of
David Hume himself for some of the suggestions concerning an
extended republic.
It was David Hume’s speculations on the "Ideal of a Perfect
Commonwealth,” first published in 1752, that most stimulated
James Madison’s thought on factions. 3 In this essay Hume dis¬
claimed any attempt to substitute a political Utopia for "the
common botched and inaccurate governments” which seemed to
serve imperfect men so well. Nevertheless, he argued, the idea
of a perfect commonwealth "is surely the most worthy curiosity
of any the wit of man can possibly devise. And who knows, if
this controversy were fixed by the universal consent of the wise
and learned, but, in some future age, an opportunity might be
afforded of reducing the theory to practice, either by a dissolution
of some old government, or by the combination of men to form
a new one, in some distant part of the world.” At the very end
of Hume’s essay was a discussion that could not help being of
interest to Madison. For here the Scot casually demolished the
Montesquieu small-republic theory; and it was this part of his
essay, contained in a single page, that was to serve Madison in
®David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (London, 1875).
Madison_ apparently used the 1758 edition, which was the most complete
printed during the Scot's lifetime, and which gathered up into two volumes
what he conceived of as the final revised version of his thoughts on the
fvafi versions of certain of the essays had been printed in
All ’ 1/48, 1752; there are numerous modem editions of the 1758 printing.
Ail page references to Hume in this article are to the 1875 edition.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 493
new-modeling a '“botched” Confederation “in a distant part of the
world” (I, 480—481, 492.)
Hume concluded his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” with
some observations on “the falsehood of the common opinion, that
no large state, such as France or Great Britain, could ever be
modelled into a commonwealth, but that such a form of govern¬
ment can only take place in a city or small territory.” The opposite
seemed to be true, decided Hume. “Though it is more difficult
to form a republican government in an extensive country than
in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of pre¬
serving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.”
The formidable problem of first unifying the outlying and
various segments of a big area had thrown Montesquieu and
like-minded theorists off the track, Hume believed. “It is not easy,
for the distant parts of a large state to combine in any plan of
free government; but they easily conspire in the esteem and
reverence for a single person, who, by means of this popular
favour, may seize the power, and forcing the more obstinate
to submit, may establish a monarchical government.” (I, 492.)
Historically, therefore, it is the great leader who has been the
symbol and engine of unity in empire building. His characteristic
ability to evoke loyalty has made him in the past a mechanism
both of solidarity and of exploitation. His leadership enables di¬
verse peoples to work for a common end, but because of the
power temptations inherent in his strategic position he usually
ends as an absolute monarch.
And yet, Hume argued, this last step is not a rigid social law
as Montesquieu would have it. There was always the possibility
that some modem leader with the wisdom and ancient virtue of
a Solon or of a Lycurgus would suppress his personal ambition
and found a free state in a large territory “to secure the peace,
happiness, and liberty of future generations.” (“Of Parties in
General,” I, 127.) In 1776—the year Hume died—a provincial
notable named George Washington was starting on the career
that was to justify Hume's penetrating analysis of the unifying
role of the great man in a large and variegated empire. Hume
would have exulted at the discovery that his deductive leap into
the future with a scientific prediction was correct: all great men
who consolidated empires did not necessarily desire crowns.
Having disposed of the reason why monarchies had usually
been set up in big empires and why it still was a matter of free
will rather than necessity, Hume then turned to the problem of
the easily founded, and unstable, small republic. In contrast to
494 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the large state, “a city readily concurs in the same notions of
government, the natural equality of property favours liberty, 4 and
the nearness of habitation enables the citizens mutually to assist
each other. Even under absolute princes, the subordinate govern¬
ment of cities is commonly republican. . . . But these same cir¬
cumstances, which facilitate the erection of commonwealths in
cities, render their constitution more frail and uncertain. Democ¬
racies are turbulent. For however the people may be separated
or divided into small parties, either in their votes or elections;
their near habitation in a city will always make the force of
popular tides and currents very sensible. Aristocracies are better
adapted for peace and order, and accordingly were most admired
by ancient writers; but they are jealous and oppressive." (I, 492.)
Here, of course, was the ancient dilemma that Madison knew so
well, re-stated by Hume. In the city where wealth and poverty
existed in close proximity, the poor, if given the vote, might very
well try to use the power of the government to expropriate the
opulent. While the rich, ever a self-conscious minority in a re¬
publican state, were constantly driven by fear of danger, even
when no danger existed in fact, to take aggressive and oppressive
measures to head off the slightest threat to their power, position,
and property.
It was Hume’s next two sentences that must have electrified
Madison as he read them: "In a large government, which is
modelled with masterly skill, there is compass and room enough
to refine the democracy, from the lower people, who may be
admitted into the first elections or first concoction of the com¬
monwealth, to the higher magistrates, who direct all the move¬
ments. At the same time, the parts are so distant and remote,
that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion,
to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.”
(I, 492.) Hume s analysis here had turned the small-territory
republic theory upside down: if a free state could once be estab-
lished in a large area, it would be stable and safe from the effects
of faction. Madison had found the answer to Montesquieu. He
4 Hume seems to be referring to the development in cities of a specialized
product, trade, or industrial skill, that gives the small area an equal interest
in a specific type of economic activity. All the inhabitants of Sheffield from
the lowly artisan to the wealthiest manufacturer had an interest in the
iron industry; every dweller in Liverpool had a stake in the prosperity of
the slave trade. It was this regional unity of occupation that Hume was
speaking of, not equality of income from the occupation, as is shown by the
latter part of his analysis. J
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 495
had also found in embryonic form his own theory of the extended
federal republic.
Madison could not but feel that the “political aphorisms” which
David Hume scattered so lavishly in his essays were worthy of
his careful study. He re-examined the sketch of Hume’s perfect
commonwealth: “a form of government, to which,” Hume
claimed, “I cannot In theory discover any considerable objection.”
Hume suggested that Great Britain and Ireland—“or any territory
of equal extent”—be divided into a hundred counties, and that
each county in turn be divided into one hundred parishes, making
in all ten thousand minor districts in the state. The twenty-pound
freeholders and five-hundred-pound householders in each parish
were to elect annually a representative for the parish. The hun¬
dred parish representatives in each county would then elect out
of themselves one “senator” and ten county “magistrates.” There
would thus be in “the whole commonwealth, 100 senators, 1100
[sic] county magistrates, and 10,000 . . . representatives.” Hume
would then have vested in the senators the executive power: “the
power of peace and war, of giving orders to generals, admirals,
and ambassadors, and, in short all the prerogatives of a British
King, except his negative.” (I, 482-483.) The county magistrates
were to have the legislative power; but they were never to as¬
semble as a single legislative body. They were to convene in their
own counties, and each county was to have one vote; and al¬
though they could initiate legislation, Hume expected the senators
normally to make policy. The ten thousand parish representatives
were to have the right to a referendum when the other two orders
in the state disagreed.
It was all very complicated and cumbersome, but Hume thought
that it would allow a government to be based on the consent of
the “people” and at the same time obviate the danger of factions.
He stated the “political aphorism” which explained his complex
system.
The lower sort of people and small proprietors are good judges
enough of one not very distant from them in rank or habitation; and
therefore, in their parochial meetings, will probably chuse the best,
or nearly the best representative: But they are wholly unfit for county-
meetings, and for electing into the higher offices of the republic. Their
ignorance gives the grandees an opportunity of deceiving them . 5
5 Essays , I, 487. Hume elaborated bis system in great detail, working out
a judiciary system, the methods of organizing and controlling the militia.
49^ REINTERPRETATION OP THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
This carefully graded hierarchy of officials therefore carried the
system of indirect elections to a logical conclusion.
Madison quite easily traced out the origin of Hume’s scheme.
He found it in the essay entitled “Of the First Principles of Gov¬
ernment.” Hume had been led to his idea of fragmentizing
election districts by his reading of Roman history and his con¬
templation of the historically verified evils incident to the direct
participation of every citizen in democratical governments. The
Scotsman had little use for “a republic,” that is to say, a direct
democracy. “For though the people, collected in a body like the
Roman tribes, be quite unfit for government, yet when dispersed
in small bodies, they are more susceptible both of reason and
order; the force of popular currents and tides is, in a great meas¬
ure, broken; and the public interest may be pursued with some
method and constancy.” (I, 113.) Hence, Hume’s careful attempts
to keep the citizens with the suffrage operating in thousands of
artifically created electoral districts. And as Madison thought over
Hume’s theoretic system, he must suddenly have seen that in this
instance the troublesome corporate aggressiveness of the thirteen
American states could be used to good purpose. There already
existed in the United States local governing units to break the
force of popular currents. There was no need to invent an arti¬
ficial system of counties in America. The states themselves could
serve as the chief pillars and supports of a new constitution in a
large-area commonwealth.
Here in Hume s Essays lay the germ for Madison’s theory of the
extended republic. It is interesting to see how he took these
scattered and incomplete fragments and built them into an intel¬
lectual and theoretical structure of his own. Madison’s first full
statement of this hypothesis appeared in his “Notes on the Con¬
federacy” written in April 1787, eight months before the final ver¬
sion of it was published as the tenth Federalist Starting with
etc. The Scot incidentally acknowledged that his thought and theories on
the subject owed much to James Harrington’s Oceana (London, 1656), “the
only valuable model of a [perfect] commonwealth that has yet been offered
to the public. For Hume thought that Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Plato’s
Republic with all other utopian blue-prints were worthless. “All plans of
government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind,”
he noted, are plainly imaginary.” Ibid., 481.
^Federalist, X, appeared in The New York Packet, Friday, Nov. 23 1787.
There are thus three versions of Madison’s theoretic formulation of how
a properly organized republic in a large area, incorporating within its
jurisdiction a multiplicity of interests, will sterilize the class conflict of the
nch versus the poor: (1) the “Notes” of Apr. 1787; (2) speeches in the
convention during June 1787; and (3) theVal po’lished and elaboraSd
form, m the Federalist, Nov. 1787.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 497
the proposition that “in republican Government, the majority, how¬
ever composed, ultimately give the law," Madison then asks what
is to restrain an interested majority from unjust violations of the
minority's rights? Three motives might be claimed to meliorate
the selfishness of the majority: first, “prudent regard for their own
good, as involved in the general . . . good”; second, “respect for
character”; and finally, religious scruples. 7 After examining each
in its turn Madison concludes that they are but a frail bulwark
against a ruthless party.
In his discussion of the insufficiency of “respect for character”
as a curb on faction, Madison again leans heavily upon Hume.
The Scot had stated paradoxically that it is “a just political maxim
that every man must he supposed a knave : Though at the same
time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true
in politics, which is false in fact . . . men are generally more honest
in their private than in their public capacity, and will go greater
lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is
alone concerned. Honour is a great check upon mankind: But
where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in
a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved of
by his own party . . . and he soon learns to despise the clamours
of adversaries.” 8 This argument, confirmed by his own experience,
seemed to Madison too just and pointed not to use, so under “Re¬
spect for character” he set down: “However strong this motive
may be in individuals, it is considered as very insufficient to re¬
strain them from injustice. In a multitude its efficacy is diminished
in proportion to the number which is to share the praise or the
blame. Besides, as it has reference to public opinion, which, within
a particular society, is the opinion of the majority, the standard is
fixed by those whose conduct is to be measured by it.” 9 The young
Virginian readily found a concrete example in Rhode Island, where
honor had proved to be no check on factious behavior. In a letter
to Jefferson explaining the theory of the new constitution, Madison
was to repeat his category of inefficacious motives, 10 but in for¬
mally presenting his theory to the world in the letters of Publius
he deliberately excluded it. 11 There was a certain disadvantage in
7 James Madison, Letters and Other Writings , 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1867),
I, 325-326.
®"Of the Independency of Parliament,” Essays, I, 118-119.
9 Letters , I, 326.
10 Ibid., p. 352, To Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 24, 1787.
“In Madison's earliest presentation of his thesis certain other elements
indicating his debt to Hume appear that have vanished in the Federalist.
In the “Notes on the Confederacy” the phrase "notorious factions and op-
49& REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
making derogatory remarks to a majority that must be persuaded
to adopt your arguments.
In April 1787, however, when Madison was writing down his
first thoughts on the advantage of an extended government, he
had still not completely thought through and integrated Hume's
system of indirect elections with his own ideas. The Virginian,
nevertheless, had not dismissed the subject from his thoughts.
He had taken a subsidiary element of Hume's “Perfect Common¬
wealth" argument and developed it as the primary factor in his
own theorem; but he was also to include Hume's major technique
of indirect election as a minor device in the constitution he pro¬
posed for the new American state. As the last paragraph of “Notes
on the Confederacy" there appears a long sentence that on its
surface has little organic relation to Madison's preceding two-page
discussion of how “an extensive Republic meliorates the adminis¬
tration of a small Republic.”
An auxiliary desideratum for the melioration of the Republican
form is such a process of elections as will most certainly extract from
the mass of the society the purest and noblest characters which it
contains; such as will at once feel most strongly the proper motives
to pursue the end of their appointment, and be most capable to devise
the proper means of attaining it . 12
This final sentence, with its abrupt departure in thought, would
be hard to explain were it not for the juxtaposition in Hume of the
material on large area and indirect election.
When Madison presented his thesis to the electorate in the
tenth Federalist as justification for a more perfect union, Hume's
Essays were to offer one final service. Hume had written a scien¬
tific analysis on “Parties in General” as well as on the “Parties of
Great Britain.” In the first of these essays he took the position in¬
dependently arrived at by Madison concerning the great variety of
factions likely to agitate a republican state. The Virginian, with
his characteristic scholarly thoroughness, therefore turned to
Hume again when it came time to parade his arguments in full
dress. Hume had made his major contribution to Madison's political
pressions which take place in corporate towns” (Letters, I, 327) recalls the
original starting point of Hume’s analysis in the “Perfect Commonwealth.”
Also the phraseology of the sentence: “The society becomes broken into a
greater variety of interests . . . which check each other . . .” (ibid.), varied
in the letter to Jefferson to: “In a large society, the people are broken into
so many interests” ( ibid ., 352), is probably a paraUel of Hume’s “The force
of popular currents and tides is, in a great measure, broken.” (“First
Principles of Governments,” Essays, I, 113.)
12 Letters , I, 328.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 499
philosophy before the Philadelphia Convention. Now he was to
help in the final polishing and elaboration of the theory for pur¬
poses of public persuasion in print.
Madison had no capacity for slavish imitation; but a borrowed
word, a sentence lifted almost in its entirety from the others
essay, and above all, the exactly parallel march of ideas in Hume s
“Parties” and Madison’s Federalist, X, show how congenial he
found the Scot’s way of thinking, and how invaluable Hume was
in the final crystallizing of Madison’s own convictions. “Men have
such a propensity to divide into personal factions,” wrote Hume,
“that the smallest appearance of real difference will produce
them.” (I, 128.) And the Virginian takes up the thread to spin
his more elaborate web: “So strong is this propensity of mankind
to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion
presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have
been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their
most violent conflicts.” 13 Hume, in his parallel passage, presents
copious examples. He cites the rivalry of the blues and the greens
at Constantinople, and recalls the feud between two tribes in
Rome, the Pollia and the Papiria, that lasted three hundred years
after everyone had forgotten the original cause of the quarrel. “If
mankind had not a strong propensity to such divisions, the indif¬
ference of the rest of the community must have suppressed this
foolish animosity [of the two tribes], that had not any aliment of
new benefits and injuries. . . (I, 128-129.) The fine Latinity of
the word “aliment” 14 apparently caught in some crevice of Madi¬
son’s mind, soon to reappear in his statement, “Liberty is to fac¬
tion what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it instantly
expires.” 15 So far as his writings show, he never used the word
ia The Federalist, Max BelofF, ed. (Oxford and New York, 1948), No. X,
p. 43. Hereafter page references to the Federalist will be to this edition.
U L. alimentum, fr. alere to nourish. Food; nutriment; hence, sustenance,
means of support.— syn. see pabulum. This word is not a common one in
18th century political literature. Outside of The Federalist and Hume's essay
I have run across it only in Bacon's works. To the man of the 18th century
even the cognate forms “ alim entary” (canal), and “alimony/' so familiar
to us in common speech, were still highly technical terms of medicine and
law.
35 Federalist, p. 42. Compare Hume's remarks: “In despotic governments,
indeed, factions often do not appear; but they are not the less real; or
rather, they are more real and more pernicious, upon that very account.
The distinct orders of men, nobles and people, soldiers and merchants, have
all a distinct interest; but the more powerful oppresses the weaker with
impunity and without resistance; which begets a seeming tranquility in such
governments.” (I, 130.) Also see Hume’s comparison of faction to “weeds
. . . which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and though absolute
governments be not wholly free from them, it must be confessed, that they
500 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
again; but in this year of 1787 his head was full of such words
and ideas culled from David Hume.
When one examines these two papers in which Hume and
Madison summed up the eighteenth century's most profound
thought on party, it becomes increasingly clear that the young
American used the earlier work in preparing a survey on faction
through the ages to introduce his own discussion of faction in
America. Hume's work was admirably adapted to this purpose. It
was philosophical and scientific in the best tradition of the En¬
lightenment. The facile damnation of faction had been a common¬
place in English politics for a hundred years, as Whig and Tory
vociferously sought to fasten the label on each other. But the Scot,
very little interested as a partisan and very much so as a social
scientist, treated the subject therefore in psychological, intellectual,
and socio-economic terms. Throughout all history, he discovered,
mankind has been divided into factions based either on personal
loyalty to some leader or upon some "sentiment or interest” com¬
mon to the group as a unit. This latter type he called a ‘Heal” as
distinguished from the "Personal” faction. Finally he subdivided
the real factions” into parties based on "interest,” upon "principle,”
or upon "affection.” Hume spent well over five pages dissecting
these three types; but Madison, while determined to be inclusive,
had not the space to go into such minute analysis. Besides, he
was more intent now on developing the cure than on describing
the malady. He therefore consolidated Hume's two-page treatment
of personal” factions, and his long discussion of parties based on
"principle and affection” into a single sentence. The tenth Fed¬
eralist reads: A zeal for different opinions concerning religion,
concerning government, and many other points, as well of specu¬
lation as of practice; 16 an attachment to different leaders am-
fSf m °l e ea . sll 5 r > an< ^ propagate themselves faster in free governments,
where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able,
X application of rewards and punishments, to eradicate them”
i . n ° tlce Madison's “The regulation of these various and
interests forms the principal task of modem legislation, and
Spmt ° f part l and faction ** the necessary and ordinary oper¬
ations of the government.” ( Federalist , p. 43.)
Madlso . n,s refers to Hume’s “parties from principle ,
speculative principle,” in the discussion of which he in-
cludes different political principles” and “principles of priestly government
has * * * be <m the poison of human society, and the source of
<n:eat 1 scL 3 tiJ et fJ a i te H £ me > 111 keeping with his reputation as the
be rillS P Sp ’ h 1 t] * at T^e the congregations of persecuting sects must
e called factions of principle, the priests, who are “the prime movers”
DOUGLASS G. ADAIR 5OI
bitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; 17 or to persons
of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the
human passions, 18 have, in turn, divided mankind into parties,
inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much
more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for
their common good.” 19 It is hard to conceive of a more perfect
example of the concentration of idea and meaning than Madison
achieved in this famous sentence.
It is noteworthy that while James Madison compressed the
greater part of Hume’s essay on factions into a single sentence, he
greatly expanded the quick sketch of the faction from “interest”
buried in the middle of the philosopher’s analysis. This reference,
in Madison’s hands, became the climax of his treatment and is the
basis of his reputation in some circles as the progenitor of the
theory of economic determinism. Hume had written that factions
in religious parties, are factious out of “interest.” The word “speculation”
that appears in Madison is rendered twice as “speculative” in Hume.
(I, 130-132.)
1T Here is Hume’s “Personal” faction, “founded on personal friendship or
animosity among such as compose the contending parties.” Hume instances
the Colonesi and Orsini of modem Rome, the Neri and Bianchi of Florence,
the rivalry between the Pollia and Papiria of ancient Rome, and the con¬
fused mass of shifting alliances that marked the struggle between Guelfs
and Ghibellines. (I, 128-129.)
w This phrase, which is quite obscure in the context, making a separate
category of a type of party apparently just covered under “contending
leaders,” refers to the loyal bitter-end Jacobites of 18th-century England.
These sentimental irreconcilables of the Squire Western ilk made up Hume’s
“party from affection” Hume explains: “By parties from affection, I under¬
stand those which are founded on the different attachments of men towards
particular families and persons, whom they desire to rule over them. These
factions are often very violent. [Hume was writing only three years before
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans had frightened all England in ’45];
though, I must own, it may seem unaccountable, that men should attach
themselves so strongly to persons, with whom they are no wise acquainted,
whom perhaps they never saw, and from whom they never received, nor
can ever hope for any favour.” (I, 133.)
The fact that Madison includes this category in his paper satisfies me that,
when he came to write the tenth Federalist for publication, he referred
directly to Hume’s volume as he reworked his introduction into its final
polished form. One can account for the other similarities in the discussion
of faction as a result of Madison’s careful reading of Hume’s works and
his retentive memory. But the inclusion of this “party from affection” in
the Virginian’s final scheme where its ambiguity indeed detracts from the
force of the argument, puts a strain on the belief that it resulted from
memory alone. This odd fourth classification, which on its face is redundant,
probably was included because Hume’s book was open on the table beside
him, and because James Madison would leave no historical stone unturned
in his effort to make a definitive scientific summary.
19 Federalist , X, pp. 42-43.
502 REINTERPRETATION OP THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
from interest "are the most reasonable, and the most excusable.
When two orders of men, such as the nobles and people, have a
distinct authority in a government, not very accurately balanced
and modelled, they naturally follow a distinct interest; nor can we
reasonably expect a different conduct, considering that degree of
selfishness implanted in human nature. It requires great skill in a
legislator to prevent such parties; and many philosophers are of
opinion, that this secret, like the grand elixir , or perpetual motion ,
may amuse men in theory, but can never possibly be reduced to
practice.” (I, 130.) With his uncomfortable thought Hume dis¬
missed the subject of economic factions as he fell into the con¬
genial task of sticking sharp intellectual pins into priestly parties
and bigots who fought over abstract political principles.
Madison, on the contrary, was not satisfied with this cursory
treatment. He had his own ideas about the importance of eco¬
nomic forces. All that Hume had to say of personal parties, of
parties of principle, and of parties of attachment, was but a pro¬
logue to the Virginian’s discussion of "the various and unequal
distribution of property,” throughout recorded history. "Those who
hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed dis¬
tinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who
are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a
manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest,
with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized na¬
tions, and divide them into different classes actuated by different
sentiments and views.” 20 Here was the pivot of Madison’s analysis.
Here in this multiplicity of economic factions was "the grand
elixir” that transformed the ancient doctrine of the rich against
the poor into a situation that a skillful American legislator might
model into equilibrium. Compound various economic interests of a
large territory with a federal system of thirteen semi-sovereign
political units, establish a scheme of indirect elections which will
functionally bind the extensive area into a unit while ‘defining” the
voice of the people, and you will have a stable republican state.
This was the glad news that James Madison carried to Phila¬
delphia. This was the theory which he claimed had made obsolete
the necessity for the "mixed government” advocated by Hamilton
and Adams. This was the message he gave to the world in the first
Federalist paper he composed. His own scientific reading of his-
tory, ancient and modem, his experience with religious factions
in Virginia, and above all his knowledge of the scientific axiom
20 Federalist, X, p. 43.
DOUGLASS G. ADAIH 503
regarding man and society in the works of David Hume, ablest
British philosopher of his age, had served him and his country
well. ‘"Of all men, that distinguish themselves by memorable
achievements, the first place of honour seems due to Legislators
and founders of states, who transmit a system of laws and institu¬
tions to secure the peace, happiness, and liberty of future genera¬
tions” (I, 127.)
THE NATURE OF THE DEBATE
The philosophical and psychological bases for the
divisions over the Constitution and the ways in which
they were manifested in the ratification debate are an¬
alyzed in the following two selections. The first uses The
Federalist as an index to the ideas, aspirations, and
intentions of the Federalists and stresses their commit¬
ment to popular government. The second discusses the
explicit arguments, implicit assumptions, and deep-seated
anxieties that lay behind the Anti-Federalist opposition
and locates that opposition squarely in the Anti-Feder¬
alist fear of the malignant effects of power.
martin diamond (b. 1919) is a member of the
Department of Political Science at Claremont Men’s
College.
Democracy and The Federalist:
A Reconsideration of the Framers' Intents
MARTIN DIAMOND
It has been a common teaching among modem historians of
the guiding ideas in the foundation of our government that the
Constitution of the United States embodied a reaction against the
democratic principles espoused in the Declaration of Independ-
ence. This view has largely been accepted by political scientists
and has therefore had important consequences for the way Amer-
Reprinted with permission from The American Political Science Review,
Lin, 1 (March, 1959), 52-68.
Note: An earlier version of this was written at the request of the Fund
for the Republic; the Fund’s generous assistance is here gratefully ac¬
knowledged.
504
MARTIN DIAMOND 505
ican political development has been studied. I shall present here
a contrary view of the political theory of the Framers and examine
some of its consequences.
What is the relevance of the political thought of the Founding
Fathers to an understanding of contemporary problems of liberty
and justice? Four possible ways of looking at the Founding Fathers
immediately suggest themselves. First, it may be that they pos¬
sessed wisdom, a set of political principles still inherently ade¬
quate, and needing only to be supplemented by skill in their proper
contemporary application. Second, it may be that, while the Found¬
ing Fathers’ principles are still sound, they are applicable only to
a part of our problems, but not to that part which is peculiarly
modem; and thus new principles are needed to be joined together
with the old ones. Third, it may be that the Founding Fathers have
simply become [obsolete]; they dealt with bygone problems and
their principles were relevant only to those old problems. Fourth,
they may have been wrong or radically inadequate even for their
own time.
Each of these four possible conclusions requires the same foun¬
dation : an understanding of the political thought of the Founding
Fathers. To decide whether to apply their wisdom, or to add to
their wisdom, or to reject it as irrelevant or as unwise, it is abso¬
lutely necessary to understand what they said, why they said it,
and what they meant by it. At the same time, however, to under¬
stand their cl aim to wisdom is to evaluate it: to know wherein
they were wise and wherein they were not, or wherein (and why)
their wisdom is unavailing for our problems. Moreover, even if it
turns out that our modem problems require wholly new principles
for their solution, an excellent way to discover those new prin¬
ciples would be to see what it is about modernity that has out¬
moded the principles of the Founding Fathers. For example, it is
possible that modern developments are themselves partly the out¬
come of the particular attempt to solve the problem of freedom
and justice upon which this country was founded. That is, our
modem difficulties may testify to fundamental errors in the
thought of the Founding Fathers; and, in the process of discerning
those errors, we may discover what better principles would be.
The solution of our contemporary problems requires very great
wisdom indeed. And in that fact lies the greatest justification for
studying anew the political thought of the Founding Fathers. For
that thought remains the finest American thought on political
matters. In studying them we may raise ourselves to their level.
In achieving their level we may free ourselves from limitations
506 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that, ironically, they tend to impose upon us, i.e., insofar as we
tend to be creatures of the society they founded. And in so freeing
ourselves we may be enabled, if it is necessary, to go beyond their
wisdom. The Founding Fathers still loom so large in our life that
the contemporary political problem of liberty and justice for
Americans could be stated as the need to choose whether to apply
their wisdom, amend their wisdom, or reject it. Only an under¬
standing of them will tell us how to choose.
For the reflections on the Fathers which follow, I employ chiefly
The Federalist as the clue to the political theory upon which rested
the founding of the American Republic. That this would be inade¬
quate for a systematic study of the Founding Fathers goes without
saying. But it is the one book, "to which,” as Jefferson wrote in
1825, appeal is habitually made by all, and rarely declined or
denied by any as evidence of the general opinion of those who
framed and of those who accepted the Constitution of the United
States, on questions as to its genuine meaning.” As such it is the
indispensable starting point for systematic study.
I
Our major political problems today are problems of democracy;
and, as much as anything else, the Federalist papers are a teaching
about democracy. The conclusion of one of the most important of
these papers states what is also the most important theme in the
entire work: the necessity for "a republican remedy for the dis¬
eases most incident to republican government.”! The theme is
clearly repeated in a passage where Thomas Jefferson is praised
for displaying equally "a fervent attachment to republican govem-
ment and an enlightened view of the dangerous propensities
against which it ought to be guarded."* The Federalist , thus,
stresses its commitment to republican or popular government, but,
of course, insists that this must be an enlightened commitment.
But The Federalist and the Founding Fathers generally have not
been taken at their word. Predominantly, they are understood as
being only quasi- or even anti-democrats. Modem American his¬
torical writing, at least until very recently, has generally seen the
Constitution as some sort of apostasy from, or reaction to, the
radically democratic implications of the Declaration of Independ-
edL^fM^Eode 0 ' ^ P * 62 ‘ ^ references are to the Modern Library edition,
federalist. No. 49, p. 327.
MARTIN DIAMOND 507
ence—a reaction that was undone by the great "democratic break¬
throughs” of Jeffersonianism, Jacksonianism, etc. This view, I
believe, involves a false understanding of the crucial political
issues involved in the founding of the American Republic. Further,
it is based implicitly upon a questionable modem approach to
democracy and has tended to have the effect, moreover, of rele¬
gating the political teaching of the Founding Fathers to the pre-
democratic past and thus of making it of no vital concern to
modems. The Founding Fathers themselves repeatedly stressed
that their Constitution was wholly consistent with the true prin¬
ciples of republican or popular government. The prevailing mod¬
em opinion, in varying degrees and in different ways, rejects that
claim. It thus becomes important to understand what was the
relation of the Founding Fathers to popular government or de¬
mocracy.
I have deliberately used interchangeably their terms, "popular
government” and "democracy.” The Founding Fathers, of course,
did not use the terms entirely synonymously and the idea that they
were less than "democrats” has been fortified by the fact that they
sometimes defined "democracy” invidiously in comparison with
"republic.” But this fact does not really justify the opinion. For
their basic view was that popular government was the genus, and
democracy and republic were two species of that genus of govern¬
ment. What distinguished popular government from other genera
of government was that in it, political authority is "derived from
the great body of the society, not from . . . [any] favoured class
of it.” 3 With respect to this decisive question, of where political
authority is lodged, democracy and republic—as The Federalist
uses the terms—differ not in the least. Republics, equally with
democracies, may claim to be wholly a form of popular govern¬
ment. This is neither to deny the difference between the two, nor
to depreciate the importance The Federalist attached to the differ-
6 Federalist, No. 39, p. 244. Here Madison speaks explicitly of the republi¬
can form of government. But see on the same page how Madison compares
the republican form with “every other popular government.” Regarding the
crucial question of the lodgement of political authority, Madison speaks of
republic, democracy and popular government interchangeably. Consider that,
in the very paper where he distinguishes so precisely between democracies
and republics regarding direct versus representative rule, Madison defines his
general aim both as a search for “a republican remedy” for republican
diseases and a remedy that will “preserve die spirit and the form of popular
government.” (p. 58.) Interestingly, on June 6 at the Federal Convention,
Madison’s phrasing for a similar problem was the search for “the only
defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the
democratic form of government.” Madison, Writings , ed. G. Hunt, VoL 3
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1902), p. 103. Italics supplied throughout.
508 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ence; but in The Federalist’s view, the difference does not relate
to the essential principle of popular government. Democracy means
in The Federalist that form of popular government where the citi¬
zens "assemble and administer the government in person.” 4 Re¬
publics differ in that the people rule through representatives and,
of course, in the consequences of that difference. The crucial point
is that republics and democracies are equally forms of popular
government, but that the one form is vastly preferable to the
other because of the substantive consequences of the difference
in form. Those historians who consider the Founding Fathers as
less than "democrats,” miss or reject the Founders’ central con¬
tention that, while being perfecdy faithful to the principle of
popular government, they had solved the problem of popular
government.
In what way is the Constitution ordinarily thought to be less
democratic than the Declaration? The argument is usually that
the former is characterized by fear of the people, by preoccupation
with minority interests and rights, and by measures therefore
taken against the power of majorities. The Declaration, it is true,
does not display these features, but this is no proof of a funda¬
mental difference of principles between the two. Is it not obviously
possible that the difference is due only to a difference in the
tasks to which the two documents were addressed? And is it not
further possible that the democratic principles of the Declaration
are not only compatible with the prophylactic measures of the
Constitution, but actually imply them?
The Declaration of Independence formulates two criteria for
judging whether any government is good, or indeed legitimate.
Good government must rest, procedurally, upon the consent of
the governed. Good government, substantively, must do only cer-
tain things, e.g., secure certain rights. This may be stated another
way by borrowing a phrase from Locke, appropriate enough when
discussing the Declaration. That "the people shall be judge” is of
the essence of democracy, is its peculiar form or method of
proceeding. That the people shall judge rightly is the substantive
problem of democracy. But whether the procedure will bring about
the substance is problematic. Between the Declaration’s two cri¬
teria, then, a tension exists: consent can be given or obtained for
governmental actions which are not right—at least as the men of
1776 saw the right. (To give an obvious example from their point
of view: the people may freely but wrongly vote away the pro-
*Federalist, No. 10, p. 58.
MARTIN DIAMOND 509
tection due to property.) Thus the Declaration clearly contained,
although it did not resolve, a fundamental problem. Solving the
problem was not its task; that was the task for the framers of
the Constitution. But the man who wrote the Declaration of Inde¬
pendence and the leading men who supported it were perfectly
aware of the difficulty, and of the necessity for a "republican
remedy.”
What the text of the Declaration, taken alone, tells of its mean¬
ing may easily be substantiated by the testimony of its author and
supporters. Consider only that Jefferson, with no known change
of heart at all, said of The Federalist that it was "the best com¬
mentary on the principles of government which was ever written.” 5
Jefferson, it must be remembered, came firmly to recommend the
adoption of the Constitution, his criticisms of it having come down
only to a proposal for rotation in the Presidency and for the sub¬
sequent adoption of a bill of rights. I do not, of course, deny the
peculiar character of "Jeffersonianism” nor the importance to
many things of its proper understanding. I only state here that it
is certain that Jefferson, unlike later historians, did not view
the Constitution as a retrogression from democracy. Or further,
consider that John Adams, now celebrated as America’s great con¬
servative, was so enthusiastic about Jefferson’s draft of the Decla¬
ration as to wish on his own account that hardly a word be
changed. And this same Adams, also without any change of heart
and without complaint, accepted the Constitution as embodying
many of his own views on government.
The idea that the Constitution was a falling back from the fuller
democracy of the Declaration thus rests in part upon a false read¬
ing of the Declaration as free from the concerns regarding democ¬
racy that the framers of the Constitution felt. Perhaps only those
would so read it who take for granted a perfect, self-subsisting
harmony between consent (equality) and the proper aim of gov¬
ernment (justice), or between consent and individual rights
(liberty). This assumption was utterly foreign to the leading men
of the Declaration.
II
The Declaration has wrongly been converted into, as it were, a
super-democratic document; has the Constitution wrongly been
B The Works of Thomas Jefferson , Paul L. Ford, ed. (The Federal Edition),
Vol. 5 (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1904), p. 434.
5 X0 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
converted in the modem view into an insufficiently democratic
document? The only basis for depreciating the democratic charac¬
ter of the Constitution lies in its framers" apprehensive diagnosis
of the "diseases,” "defects” or "evil propensities” of democracy, and
in their remedies. But if what the Founders considered to be
defects are genuine defects, and if the remedies, without violating
the principles of popular government, are genuine remedies, then
it would be unreasonable to call the Founders anti- or quasi¬
democrats. Rather, they would be the wise partisans of democracy;
a man is not a better democrat but only a foolish democrat if he
ignores real defects inherent in popular government. Thus, the
question becomes: are there natural defects to democracy and, if
there are, what are the best remedies?
In part, the Founding Fathers answered this question by em¬
ploying a traditional mode of political analysis. They believed
there were several basic possible regimes, each having several
possible forms. Of these possible regimes they believed the best,
or at least the best for America, to be popular government, but
only if purged of its defects. At any rate, an unpurged popular
government they believed to be indefensible. They believed there
were several forms of popular government, crucial among these
direct democracy and republican—or representative—government
(the latter perhaps divisible into two distinct forms, large and
small republics). Their constitution and their defense of it con¬
stitute an argument for that form of popular government (large
republic) in which the "evil propensities” would be weakest or
most susceptible of remedy.
The whole of the thought of the Founding Fathers is intelligible
and, especially, the evaluation of their claim to be wise partisans
of popular government is possible, only if the words " disease ,”
“defect” ax id “evil propensity ” are allowed their full force. Unlike
modem value-free” social scientists, the Founding Fathers be¬
lieved that true knowledge of the good and bad in human conduct
was possible, and that they themselves possessed sufficient knowl-
edge to discern the really grave defects of popular government and
their proper remedies. The modem relativistic or positivistic
theories, implicitly employed by most commentators on the Found-
ing Fathers, deny the possibility of such true knowledge and there-
fore deny that the Founding Fathers could have been actuated by
knowledge of the good rather than by passion or interest. (I delib¬
erately employ the language of Federalist No. 10. Madison defined
faction, in part, as a group "united and actuated by . . . passion,
or . . . interest.” That is, factions are groups not —as presumably
MARTIN DIAMOND 5II
the authors of The Federalist were—actuated by reason.) How
this modem view of the value problem supports the conception
of the Constitution as less democratic than the Declaration is
clear. The Founding Fathers did in fact seek to prejudice the out¬
come of democracy; they sought to alter, by certain restraints,
the likelihood that the majority would decide certain political
issues in bad ways. These restraints the Founders justified as
mitigating the natural defects of democracy. But, say the modems,
there are no “bad” political decisions, wrong-in-themselves, from
reaching which the majority ought to be restrained. Therefore,
ultimately, nothing other than the specific interests of the Founders
can explain their zeal in restraining democracy. And inasmuch
as the restraints were typically placed on the many in the interest
of the propertied, the departure of the Constitution is “anti-demo¬
cratic” or “thermidorean.” In short, according to this view, there
cannot be what the Founders claimed to possess, “an enlightened
view of the dangerous propensities against which [popular govern¬
ment] . . . ought to be guarded,” the substantive goodness or bad¬
ness of such propensities being a matter of opinion or taste on
which reason can shed no light.
What are some of the arrangements which have been considered
signs of “undemocratic” features of the Constitution? The process
by which the Constitution may be amended is often cited in evi¬
dence. Everyone is familiar with the arithmetic which shows that
a remarkably small minority could prevent passage of a constitu¬
tional amendment supported by an overwhelming majority of the
people. That is, bare majorities in the thirteen least populous states
could prevent passage of an amendment desired by overwhelming
majorities in the thirty-six most populous states. But let us, for a
reason to be made clear in a moment, turn that arithmetic around.
Bare majorities in the thirty-seven least populous states can pass
amendments against the opposition of overwhelming majorities in
the twelve most populous states. And this would mean in actual
votes today (and would have meant for the thirteen original
states) constitutional amendment by a minority against the oppo¬
sition of a majority of citizens. My point is simply that, while the
amending procedure does involve qualified majorities, the qualifi¬
cation is not of the kind that requires an especially large numeri¬
cal majority for action.
I suggest that the real aim and practical effect of the compli¬
cated amending procedure was not at all to give power to minori¬
ties, but to ensure that passage of an amendment would require
a nationally distributed majority, though one that legally could
5*2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
consist of a bare numerical majority. It was only adventitious that
the procedure has the theoretical possibility of a minority blocking
(or passing) an amendment. The aim of requiring nationally
distributed majorities was, I think, to ensure that no amendment
could be passed simply with the support of the few states or sec-
tions sufficiently numerous to provide a bare majority. No doubt
it was also believed that it would be difficult for such a national
majority to form or become effective save for the decent purposes
that could command national agreement, and this difficulty was
surely deemed a great virtue of the amending process. This is
what I think The Federalist really means when it praises the
amending process and says that “it guards equally against that
extreme facility, which would render the Constitution too mutable;
and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered
faults.” 6 All I wish to emphasize here is that the actual method
adopted, with respect to the numerical size of majorities, is meant
to leave all legal power in the hands of ordinary majorities so long
as they are national majorities. The departure from simple ma-
joritarianism is, at least, not in an oligarchic or aristocratic direc-
tion. In this crucial respect, the amending procedure does con¬
form strictly to the principles of republican (popular) government.
Consider next the suffrage question. It has long been assumed
as proof of an anti-democratic element in the Constitution that the
Founding Fathers depended for the working of their Constitution
upon a substantially limited franchise. Just as the Constitution
allegedly was ratified by a highly qualified electorate, so too, it is
held, was the new government to be based upon a suffrage subject
to substantial property qualifications. This view has only recently
been seriously challenged, especially by Robert E. Brown, whose
etailed researches convince him that the property qualifications
m nearly ah the original states were probably so small as to ex¬
clude never more than twenty-five per cent, and in most cases
as little as only five to ten per cent, of the adult white male
population. 7 That is, the property qualifications were not designed
to exciude the mass of the poor but only the small proportion
which lacked a concrete—however small—stake in society, i.e„
primarily the transients or “idlers.”
The Constitution, of course, left the suffrage question to the de¬
cision of the individual states. What is the implication of that
fact for deciding what sort of suffrage the Framers had in mind?
* Federalist , No. 43, p. 286.
in Massachusetts, 1691-1780.
MARTIN DIAMOND 513
The immediately popular branch of the national legislature was to
be elected by voters who "shall have the qualifications requisite for
electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature.”
The mode of election to the electoral college for the Presidency
and to the Senate is also left to "be prescribed in each State by
the legislature thereof.” At a minimum, it may be stated that the
Framers did not themselves attempt to reduce, or prevent the
expansion of, the suffrage; that question was left wholly to the
states—and these were, ironically, the very hotbeds of post-revolu¬
tionary democracy from the rule of which it is familiarly alleged
that the Founders sought to escape. 8
In general, the conclusion seems inescapable that the states had
a far broader suffrage than is ordinarily thought, and nothing in
the actions of the Framers suggests any expectation or prospect
of the reduction of the suffrage. Again, as in the question of the
amending process, I suggest that the Constitution represented no
departure whatsoever from the democratic standards of the Rev¬
olutionary period, or from any democratic standards then gen¬
erally recognized. 9
What of the Senate? The organization of the Senate, its term of
office and its staggered mode of replacement, its election by state
legislatures rather than directly by the people, among other things,
have been used to demonstrate the undemocratic character of the
Senate as intended by the Framers. Was this not a device to repre¬
sent property and not people, and was it not intended therefore to
be a non-popular element in the government? I suggest, on the
contrary, that the really important thing is that the Framers
8 Madison must have thought that he had established this point beyond
misinterpretation in The Federalist, No. 57. “Who are to be the electors of
the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the
learned, more than the Ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished
names, more than the humble sons of obscurity and unpropitious fortune.
The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States.
They are to be the same who exercise the right in every State of electing
the corresponding branch of the legislature of the State/' (p. 371.)
®This is not to deny the importance of the existing property qualifications
for the understanding of the Founders' political theory. The legal exclusion
from the franchise of even a very small portion of the adult population may
have enormous significance for the politics and life of a country. This is
obvious in the case of a racial, ethnic or religious minority. And the ex¬
clusion of otherwise eligible adult males on the grounds of poverty may be
equally important. The property qualification clearly praises and rewards
certain virtues, implies that the voter must possess certain qualities to
warrant his exercise of the franchise, and aims at excluding a “rabble” from
the operations of political parties. But important, therefore, as the property
qualification was, it does not demonstrate that the Founding Fathers de¬
parted radically from the most important aspects of the principle of
majority rule.
5X4 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
thought they had found a way to protect property without repre¬
senting it. That the Founders intended the Senate to be one of the
crucial devices for remedying the defects of democracy is certainly
true. But The Federalist argues that the Senate, as actually pro¬
posed in the Constitution, was calculated to be such a device as
would operate only in a way that "will consist . . . with the genuine
principles of republican government.” 10 I believe that the claim
is just.
Rather than viewing the Senate from the perspective of modem
experience and opinions, consider how radically democratic the
Senate appears when viewed from a pre-modem perspective. The
model of a divided legislature that the Founders had most in
mind was probably the English Parliament. There the House of
Lords was thought to provide some of the beneficial checks upon
the popular Commons which it was hoped the Senate would sup¬
ply in the American Constitution. But the American Senate was to
possess none of the qualities which permitted the House of Lords
to fulfill its role; i.e., its hereditary basis, or membership upon
election by the Crown, or any of its other aristocratic character¬
istics. 11 Yet the Founding Fathers knew that the advantages of
having both a Senate and a House would "be in proportion to the
dissimilarity in the genius of the two bodies/’ 12 What is remark¬
able is that, in seeking to secure this dissimilarity, they did not in
any respect go beyond the limits permitted by the "genuine
principles of republican government/’
Not only is this dramatically demonstrated in comparison with
the English House of Lords, but also in comparison with all earlier
theory regarding the division of the legislative power. The aim of
such a division in earlier thought is to secure a balance between
the aristocratic and democratic elements of a polity. This is con¬
nected with the pre-modem preference for a mixed republic, which
was rejected by the Founders in favor of a democratic republic.
And the traditional way to secure this balance or mixture was to
give one house or office to the suffrages of the few and one to
the suffrages of the many. Nothing of the kind is involved in the
American Senate. Indeed, on this issue, so often cited as evidence
of the Founders’ undemocratic predilections, the very opposite is
the case. The Senate is a constitutional device which par excellence
reveals the strategy of the Founders. They wanted something like
the advantages earlier thinkers had seen in a mixed legislative
10 Federalist , No. 62, p. 403.
31 Federalist , No. 63, p. 415.
32 Federalist , No. 62, p. 403.
MARTIN DIAMOND 515
power, but they thought this was possible (and perhaps prefer¬
able) without any introduction whatsoever of aristocratic power
into their system. What pre-modem thought had seen in an aris¬
tocratic senate—wisdom, nobility, manners, religion, etc.—the
Founding Fathers converted into stability, enlightened self-interest,
a “temperate and respectable body of citizens.” The qualities of a
senate having thus been altered (involving perhaps comparable
changes in the notion of the ends of government), it became pos¬
sible to secure these advantages through a Senate based wholly
upon popular principles. Or so I would characterize a Senate
whose membership required no property qualification and which
was appointed (or elected in the manner prescribed) by State leg¬
islatures which, in their own turn, were elected annually or bien¬
nially by a nearly universal manhood suffrage.
The great claim of The Federalist is that the Constitution rep¬
resents the fulfillment of a truly novel experiment, of “a revolu¬
tion which has no parallel in the annals of society,” and which is
decisive for the happiness of “the whole human race.” 13 And the
novelty, I argue, consisted in solving the problems of popular gov¬
ernment by means which yet maintain the government “wholly
popular.” 14 In defending that claim against the idea of the Con¬
stitution as a retreat from democracy I have dealt thus far only
with the easier task: the demonstration that the constitutional
devices and arrangements do not derogate from the legal power
of majorities to rule. What remains is to examine the claim that
the Constitution did in fact remedy the natural defects of democ¬
racy. Before any effort is made in this direction, it may be useful
to summarize some of the implications and possible utility of the
analysis thus far.
Above all, the merit of the suggestions I have made, if they are
accurate in describing the intention and action of the Founders,
is that it makes the Founders available to us for the study of
modem problems. I have tried to restore to them their bona ftdes
as partisans of democracy. This done, we may take seriously the
question whether they were, as they claimed to be, wise partisans
of democracy or popular government. If they were partisans of
democracy and if the regime they created was decisively demo¬
cratic, then they speak to us not merely about bygone problems,
not from a viewpoint—in this regard—radically different from our
own, but as men addressing themselves to problems identical in
13 Federalist , No. 14, p. 85.
u Ibid., p. 81.
516 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
principle with our own. They are a source from within our own
heritage which teaches us the way to put the question to democ¬
racy, a way which is rejected by certain prevailing modem ideas.
But we cannot avail ourselves of their assistance if we consider
American history to be a succession of democratizations which
overcame the Founding Fathers’ intentions. On that view it is
easy to regard them as simply outmoded. If I am right regarding
the extent of democracy in their thought and regime, then they
are not outmoded by modem events but rather are tested by them.
American history, on this view, is not primarily the replacement
of a pre-democratic regime by a democratic regime, but is rather
a continuing testimony to how the Founding Fathers’ democratic
regime has worked out in modern circumstances. The whole of
our national experience thus becomes a way of judging the
Founders’ principles, of judging democracy itself, or of pondering
the flaws of democracy and the means to its improvement.
Ill
What was the Founding Fathers’ view of the good life? Upon
what fundamental theoretical premises did that view of the good
life depend? How comprehensive was their understanding of the
dangers against which popular government was to be guarded?
How efficacious were their remedies and what may have been
the unanticipated costs of those remedies? These questions are
clearly too vast to answer here and now. What follows is only a
series of notes which bear upon the problems raised, and which
I think may serve as general guides to what it is important to seek
in studying the Founding Fathers.
The Federalist does not discuss systematically, as would a theo¬
retical treatise, the question of the ends or purposes of government.
That is, it does not deal systematically with philosophical issues.
This is not to say that its authors did not have a view in such
matters. But what that view was, and what are its implications
for the understanding of the Constitution, is a subject on which
I find it difficult to speak with confidence. I must still regard as
open the question whether the authors of The Federalist, or the
other leading founders, had themselves fully reflected on these
matters, or whether they treated them as settled by thinkers like
Locke and Montesquieu, or whether crucial premises in their
thought were unreflectively taken for granted. But men cannot
act on a political scale so vast as they did without having and
MARTIN DIAMOND 517
employing a view of the politically fundamental; and it is this
view which provides the crucial perspective for the understanding
of their particular actions and thoughts.
Perhaps the most explicit fundamental utterance of The Fed¬
eralist is the statement regarding
the great principle of self-preservation . . . the transcendent law of
nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happi¬
ness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim,
and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. 15
But self-preservation, it is made clear, includes more than mere
preservation. This passage, which interestingly echoes the Decla¬
ration of Independence on the "laws of nature and of nature’s
God,” emphasizes that preservation includes “happiness” as well
as “safety.” That is, The Federalist is aware of and explicitly re¬
jects the kind of regime that would follow from a narrower view
of self-preservation. For example. The Federalist seems explicitly
to be rejecting Hobbes when, in another context, it rejects the
view that “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain
[men] from destroying and devouring one another.” 16 But while it
rejects the “chains of despotism,” Le., the Hobbesean solution to
the problem of self-preservation, it nonetheless seems to accept
the Hobbesean statement of the problem. As it were, the primary
fears of The Federalist are Hobbesean, that is, fears of “foreign
war and domestic convulsion.” Rejecting a despotic solution, the
great aim of The Federalist is to supply a liberal and republican
solution to the same problem. But while there is a great difference,
never to be underestimated, between a liberal and a repressive, a
republican and a monarchical solution, it may be that in making
the same dangers and their solution the desideratum for the struc¬
ture and functions of government much of the Hobbesean view
is preserved.
The main object of The Federalist was to urge the necessity of a
firm and energetic Union. The utility of such a Union, and there¬
fore the chief ends it will serve, is that it will strengthen the
American people against the dangers of “foreign war” and secure
them from the dangers of “domestic convulsion.” These functions
of government are the most frequently discussed and the most
vehemently emphasized in the whole work. To a very great extent,
then, The Federalist determines the role of government with ref¬
erence only, or primarily, to the extremes of external and internal
15 Federalist , No. 43, p. 287.
30 Federalist, No. 55, p. 365.
518 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
danger. It is to avoid the pre-civil forms of these dangers that men
form government and it is the civil solution of these dangers
which, almost exclusively, determines the legitimate objects of
government. But again. The Federalist repeatedly emphasizes
that a “novel” solution is at hand. The means now exist—and
America is uniquely in a position to employ them—for a republi¬
can solution which avoids the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.
But notice that, on this view, liberalism and republicanism are
not the means by which men may ascend to a nobler life; rather
they are simply instrumentalities which solve Hobbesean problems
in a more moderate manner. It is tempting to suggest that if
America is a “Lockean” nation, as is so often asserted, it is true
in the very precise sense that Locke’s “comfortable preservation”
displaces the harshness of the Hobbesean view, while not repudi¬
ating that view in general.
To be sure. The Federalist does make other explicit statements
regarding the ends of government. For example: “Justice is the end
of government. It is the end of civil society.” 17 But this statement,
to the best of my knowledge, is made only once in the entire work;
and the context suggests that “justice” means simply “civil rights”
which in turn seems to refer primarily to the protection of eco¬
nomic interests. That justice has here this relatively narrow mean¬
ing, as compared with traditional philosophical and theological
usage, is made more probable when we take account of the crucial
statement in Federalist No. 10. There the “first object of govem-
ment is the protection of the diverse human faculties from which
arise the “rights of property” and the unequal distribution of
property. The importance of this statement of the function of
government is underscored when it is recalled how large a propor-
tion of The Federalist deals with the improvements in “commerce”
made possible by the new Constitution. For example, in a list of
the four “principal objects of federal legislation,” 18 three (foreign
trade, interstate trade, and taxes) deal explicitly with commerce.
The fourth, the militia, also deals with commerce insofar as it
largely has to do with the prevention of “domestic convulsion”
brought on by economic matters.
The very great emphasis of The Federalist on commerce, and
on the role of government in nurturing it, may not be at all in¬
compatible with the theme of “happiness” which is the most fre¬
quently occurring definition of the “object of government.” The
most definite statement is the following:
^Federalist, No. 51, p. 340.
u Federalist , No. 53, pp. 350-351.
MARTIN DIAMOND 519
A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object
of government, which is the happiness of the people, secondly, a knowl¬
edge of the means by which that object can be best obtained. 19
The Federalist is not very explicit in defining happiness. But
there are firm indications that what it had in mind has little in
common with traditional philosophical or theological understand¬
ings of the term. At one place, The Federalist indicates that
happiness requires that government "provide for the security,
advance the prosperity, [and] support the reputation of the com¬
monwealth.” 20 In another, happiness seems to require "our safety,
our tranquility, our dignity, our reputation.” 21 Part of what these
words mean is made clear by the fact that they summarize a
lengthy indictment of the Articles of Confederation, the particu¬
lars of which deal in nearly every case with commercial short¬
comings. Happiness, "a knowledge of the means” to which The
Federalist openly claims to possess, seems to consist primarily in
physical preservation from external and internal danger and in
the comforts afforded by a commercial society; which comforts
are at once the dividends of security and the means to a republi¬
can rather than repressive security.
What is striking is the apparent exclusion from the functions
of government of a wide range of non-economic tasks traditionally
considered the decisive business of government. It is tempting to
speculate that this reduction in the tasks of government has
something to do with The Federalists defense of popular govern¬
ment. The traditional criticism of popular government was that
it gave over the art of government into the hands of the many,
which is to say the unwise. It would be a formidable reply to
reduce the complexity of the governmental art to dimensions more
commensurate with the capacity of the many. I use two state¬
ments by Madison, years apart, to illustrate the possibility that
he may have had something like this in mind. "There can be no
doubt that there are subjects to which the capacities of the bulk
of mankind are unequal.” 22 But on the other hand, "the confidence
of the [Republican party] in the capacity of mankind for self-
government” 23 is what distinguished it from the Federalist party
which distrusted that capacity. The confidence in mankind’s
^Federalist, No. 62, p. 404.
20 Federalist, No. 30, p. 186.
21 Federalist , No. 15, p. 88.
22 Letter to Edmund Randolph, January 10, 1788.
^Letter to W illia m Eustis, May 22, 1823. The letters to Randolph and
Eustis were brought to my attention by Ralph Ketcham’s article, “Notes on
James Madison’s Sources for the Tenth Federalist Paper,” Midwest Journal
of Political Science, Vol. 1 (May, 1957).
520 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
capacities would seem to require having removed from govern¬
ment the subjects to which those capacities are unequal.
IV
So far as concerns those ends of government on which The
Federalist is almost wholly silent, it is reasonable to infer that
what the Founders made no provision for they did not rank
highly among the legitimate objects of government. Other political
theories had ranked highly, as objects of government, the nurtur¬
ing of a particular religion, education, military courage, civic¬
spiritedness, moderation, individual excellence in the virtues,
etc. On all of these The Federalist is either silent, or has in mind
only pallid versions of the originals, or even seems to speak with
contempt. The Founders apparently did not consider it necessary
to make special provision for excellence. Did they assume these
virtues would flourish without governmental or other explicit
provision? Did they consciously sacrifice some of them to other
necessities of a stable popular regime—as it were, as the price
of their solution to the problem of democracy? Or were these
virtues less necessary to a country when it had been properly
founded on the basis of the new “science of politics”? In what
follows I suggest some possible answers to these questions.
The Founding Fathers are often criticized for an excessive
attention to, and reliance upon, mechanical institutional arrange¬
ments and for an insufficient attention to “sociological” factors.
While a moderate version of this criticism may finally be just, it
is nonetheless clear that The Federalist pays considerable and
shrewd attention to such factors. For example, in Federalist No.
51, equal attention is given to the institutional and non-institu-
tional strengths of the new Constitution. One of these latter is
the solution to the “problems of faction.” It will be convenient to
examine Federalist No. 10 where the argument about faction is
more fully developed than in No. 51. A close examination of
that solution reveals something about The Federalist’s view of the
virtues necessary to the good life.
The problem dealt with in the tenth essay is how “to break
and control the violence of faction.” “The friend of popular gov¬
ernments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character
and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this danger¬
ous vice.” Faction is, thus, the problem of popular government.
Now it must be made clear that Madison, the author of this
essay, was not here really concerned with the problem of faction
MARTIN DIAMOND $21
generally. He devotes only two sentences in the whole essay to
the dangers of minority factions. The real problem in a popular
government, then, is majority faction, or, more precisely, the
majority faction, i.e. y the great mass of the little propertied and
unpropertied. This is the only faction that can "execute and mask
its violence under the forms of the Constitution.” That is, in the
American republic the many have the legal power to rule and
thus from them can come the greatest harm. Madison interprets
that harm fairly narrowly; at least, his overwhelming emphasis
is on the classic economic struggle between the rich and the poor
which made of ancient democracies "spectacles of turbulence
and contention.” The problem for the friend of popular govern¬
ment is how to avoid the "domestic convulsion” which results
when the rich and the poor, the few and the many, as is their
wont, are at each others’ throats. Always before in popular gov¬
ernments the many, armed with political power, invariably pre¬
cipitated such convulsions. But the friend of popular government
must find only "a republican remedy” for this disease which is
"most incident to republican government.” "To secure the public
good and private rights against the danger of . . . [majority]
faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form
of popular government, is then the great object to which our
inquiries are directed.”
Without wrenching Madison’s meaning too greatly, the problem
may be put crudely this way: Madison gave a beforehand answer
to Marx. The whole of the Marxian scheme depends upon the
many—having been proletarianized—causing precisely such do¬
mestic convulsion and usurpation of property as Madison wished
to avoid. Madison believed that in America the many could be
diverted from that probable course. How will the many, the
majority, be prevented from using for the evil purpose of usurping
property the legal power which is theirs in a popular regime?
"Evidently by one of two [means] only. Either the existence of
the same passion or interest in a majority at the time must be
prevented, or the majority, having such co-existent passion or
interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation,
unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.”
But "we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can
be relied on” to do these things. The "circumstance principally”
which will solve the problem is the "greater number of citizens
and extent of territory which may be brought within the com¬
pass” of large republican governments rather than of small direct
democracies.
Rather than mutilate Madison, let me complete his thought
522 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
by quoting the rest of his argument before commenting on it:
The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct
parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of
the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing
a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed,
the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.
Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and
interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will
have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if
such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who
feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each
other.
I want to deal only with what is implied or required by the
first of the two means, i.e., preventing the majority from having
the same “passion or interest” at the same time. I would argue
that this is the more important of the two remedial means af¬
forded by a large republic. If the majority comes to have the
same passion or interest and holds to it intensely for a period of
only four to six years, it seems certain that it would triumph over
the “extent of territory,” over the barriers of federalism, and
separation of powers, and all the checks and balances of the
Constitution. I do not wish to depreciate the importance of those
barriers; I believe they have enormous efficacy in stemming the
tide Madison feared. But I would argue that their efficacy depends
upon a prior weakening of the force applied against them, upon
the majority having been fragmented or deflected from its
“schemes of oppression.” An inflamed Marxian proletariat would
not indefinitely be deterred by institutional checks or extent
of territory. The crucial point then, as I see it, is the means by
which a majority bent upon oppression is prevented from ever
forming or becoming firm.
Madison's whole scheme essentially comes down to this. The
struggle of classes is to be replaced by a struggle of interests.
The class struggle is domestic convulsion; the struggle of interests
is a safe, even energizing, struggle which is compatible with, or
even promotes, the safety and stability of society. But how can
this be accomplished? What will prevent the many from thinking
of their interest as that of the Many opposed to the Few? Madison,
as I see it, implies that nothing can prevent it in a small demo¬
cratic society where the many are divided into only a few trades
and callings: these divisions are insufficient to prevent them
from conceiving their lot in common and uniting for oppression.
But in a large republic, numerous and powerful divisions will
MARTIN DIAMOND 523
arise among the many to prevent that happening. A host of
interests grows up "of necessity in civilized nations, and divide[s]
them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and
views.” "Civilized nations” clearly means here large, commercial
societies. In a large commercial society the interest of the many
can be fragmented into many narrower, more limited interests.
The mass will not unite as a mass to make extreme demands
upon the few, the struggle over which will destroy society; the
mass will fragment into relatively small groups, seeking small
immediate advantages for their narrow and particular interests.
If the Madisonian solution is essentially as I have described it,
it becomes clear that certain things are required for the solution
to operate. I only mention several of them. First, the country
in which this is to take place will have to be profoundly demo¬
cratic. That is, all men must be free—and even encouraged—
to seek their immediate profit and to associate with others in the
process. There must be no rigid class barriers which bar men
from the pursuit of immediate interest. Indeed, it is especially
the lowly, from whom the most is to be feared, who must feel
most sanguine about the prospects of achieving limited and imme¬
diate benefits. Second, the gains must be real; that is, the frag¬
mented interests must from time to time achieve real gains, else
the scheme would cease to beguile or mollify. But I do not want
to develop these themes here. Rather, I want to emphasize only
one crucial aspect of Madison’s design: that is, the question of
the apparently narrow ends of society envisaged by the Founding
Fathers. Madison’s plan, as I have described it, most assuredly
does not rest on the "moral and religious motives” whose efficacy
he deprecated. Indeed there is not even the suggestion that the
pursuit of interest should be an especially enlightened pursuit.
Rather, the problem posed by the dangerous passions and interests
of the many is solved primarily by a reliance upon passion and
interest themselves. As Tocqueville pointed out, Americans employ
the principle of "self-interest rightly understood.”
The principle of self-interest rightly understood is not a lofty one,
but it is clear and sure. It does not aim at mighty objects, but it at¬
tains . . . all those at which it aims. By its admirable conformity to
human weaknesses it easily obtains great dominion; nor is that do¬
minion precarious, since the principle checks one personal interest by
another, and uses, to direct the passions, the very same instrument
that excites them . 24
24 Democracy in America , Phillips Bradley, ed. (Knopf, New York, 1951)
Vol. 2, pp. 122-123.
524 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Madison’s solution to his problem worked astonishingly well.
The danger he wished to avert has been averted and largely for
the reasons he gave. But it is possible to question now whether
he did not take too narrow a view of what the dangers were.
Living today as beneficiaries of his system, we may yet wonder
whether he failed to contemplate other equally grave problems
of democracy, or whether his remedy for the one disease has not
had some unfortunate collateral consequences. The Madisonian
solution involved a fundamental reliance on ceaseless striving
after immediate interest (perhaps now immediate gratification).
Tocqueville appreciated that this “permanent agitation . . . is
characteristic of a peaceful democracy,” 25 one might even say,
the price of its peace. And Tocqueville was aware of how great
might be the price. “In the midst of this universal tumult, this
incessant conflict of jarring interests, this continual striving of
men after fortune, where is that calm to be found which is neces¬
sary for the deeper combinations of the intellect?” 26
V
There is, I think, in The Federalist a profound distinction made
between the qualities necessary for Founders and the qualities
necessary for the men who come after. It is a distinction that
bears on the question of the Founding Fathers’ view of what is
required for the good life and on their defense of popular govern¬
ment. Founding requires “an exemption from the pestilential
influence of party animosities”; 27 but the subsequent governing
of America will depend on precisely those party animosities,
moderated in the way I have described. Or again, founding re¬
quires that “reason” and not the “passions,” “sit in judgment.” 28
But, as I have argued, the society once founded will subsequently
depend precisely upon the passions, only moderated in their
consequences by having been guided into proper channels. The
reason of the Founders constructs the system within which the
passions of the men who come after may be relied upon.
Founders need a knowledge of the newly improved “science
of politics” and a knowledge of the great political alternatives in
order to construct a durable regime; while the men who come
25 Ibid ., p. 42.
26 Idem .
27 Federalist , No. 37, p. 232.
28 Federalist , No., 49, p. 331.
MARTIN DIAMOND 525
after need be only legislators who are but interested "advocates
and parties to the causes they determine.” 29 The Federalist speaks,
as has often been observed, with harsh realism about the short¬
comings of human nature, but, as has not so often been observed,
none of its strictures can characterize the Founders; they must be
free of these shortcomings in order to have had disinterested and
true knowledge of political things. While "a nation of philosophers
is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished
for by Plato,” 30 it is tempting to speculate that The Federalist
contemplates a kind of philosopher-founder the posthumous dura¬
tion of whose rule depends upon "that veneration which time
bestows on everything,” 31 and in particular on a regime well-
founded. But once founded, it is a system that has no necessary
place and makes no provision for men of the founding kind.
It is clear that not all now regarded as Founding Fathers were
thought by the authors of The Federalist to belong in that august
company. Noting that "it is not a little remarkable” that all previ¬
ous foundings of regimes were "performed by some individual
citizen of pre-eminent wisdom and approved integrity,” 32 The
Federalist comments on the difficulty that must have been experi¬
enced when it was attempted to found a regime by the action of
an assembly of men. I think it can be shown that The Federalist
views that assembly, the Federal Convention, as having been
subject to all the weaknesses of multitudes of men. The real
founders, then, were very few in number, men learned in the
new science of politics who seized upon a uniquely propitious
moment when their plans were consented to first by a body of
respectable men and subsequently, by equally great good fortune,
by the body of citizens. As it were, America provided a rare
moment when "the prejudices of the community” 33 were on the
side of wisdom. Not unnaturally, then, The Federalist is extremely
reluctant to countenance any re-opening of fundamental questions
or delay in ratifying the Constitution.
This circumstance—wisdom meeting with consent—is so rare
that "it is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to per¬
ceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand.” 34 But once consent
has been given to the new wisdom, when the government has
29 Federalist , No. 10, p. 56.
^Federalist, No. 49, p. 329.
31 Ibid., p. 328.
32 Federalist , No. 38, p. 233.
33 Federalist , No. 49, p. 329.
34 Federalist , No. 38, p. 231.
526 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
been properly founded, it will be a durable regime whose per¬
petuation requires nothing like the wisdom and virtue necessary
for its creation. The Founding Fathers' belief that they had
created a system of institutions and an arrangement of the
passions and interests, that would be durable and self-perpetu¬
ating, helps explain their failure to make provision for men of
their own kind to come after them. Apparently, it was thought
that such men would not be needed.
But does not the intensity and kind of our modem problems
seem to require of us a greater degree of reflection and public¬
spiritedness than the Founders thought sufficient for the men
who came after them? One good way to begin that reflection
would be to return to their level of thoughtfulness about funda¬
mental political alternatives, so that we may judge for ourselves
wisely regarding the profound issues that face us. I know of no
better beginning for that thoughtfulness than a full and serious
contemplation of the political theory that informed the origin of
the Republic, of the thought and intention of those few men
who fully grasped what the "assembly of demi-gods” was doing.
Men of Little Faith:
The Anti-Federalists on the
JV *alure of Representative Government
CECELIA M. KENYON
One of the gravest defects of the late Charles Beard's economic
interpretation of the Constitution is the limited perspective it has
encouraged in those who have accepted it, and the block to fruit-
ful investigation of the ideas and institutions of the Revolutionary
Age to which it has been conducive. Like many theories influential
in both the determination and the interpretation of historical
events, Beard's thesis and its implications were never carefully
analyzed either by himself or his followers. As a result, its impact
on the study of American history produced certain effects not
Reprinted with permission from The William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd
ser., XII, No. 1 (January, 1955), 3-43.
CECELIA M. KENYON 527
anticipated, which Beard himself must surely have regretted. The
economic interpretation employed by him somewhat tentatively
as a tool for analysis and research quickly became a methodologi¬
cal stereotype and led to a stereotypical appreciation of the Con¬
stitution and of the historical context in which it was created.
Beard's failure—perhaps it was deliberate refusal—to subject
his thesis to rigorous analysis or to define it with precision makes
it impossible to label him a clear-cut, thorough-going economic
determinist. His position was always ambiguous and ambivalent,
and in his later years he explicitly repudiated any monistic theory
of causation. 1 Nevertheless, the thrust of An Economic Interpre¬
tation of the Constitution and the effects of its thesis as applied
have frequently been those of simple and uncritical commitment
to a theory of economic determinism.
Of these effects, the most significant has been a disinclination
to explore the theoretical foundations of the Constitution. In the
chapter entitled “The Constitution as an Economic Document,"
Beard presented the structure of the government, particularly the
system of separation of powers and checks and balances, as the
institutional means chosen by the Founding Fathers to protect
their property rights against invasion by democratic majorities. 2
X A critical and definitive study of Beard as an historian has not yet been
done. Interesting commentaries on the ambiguity to be found in Beard's
thesis are Max Lemer’s "Charles A. Beard,” in his Ideas Are Weapons (New
York, 1939), pp. 161—162, and Bichard Hofstadter's "Charles Beard and the
Constitution,” in Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal , edited by Howard K. Beale
(University of Kentucky Press, 1954). Hofstadter also cites the different
attitudes toward the Constitution and its framers reflected in the Beards'
The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and their Basic History of the
United States (1944). Beale's essay in the same collection, "Charles Beard:
Historian,” recounts in broad terms the shifts in Beard's historiographical
thought throughout his career. It is with the Beard of the earlier period that
this essay is concerned, for this was the period of his most influential
works.
2 Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New
York, 1913), Ch. VI, especially pp. 154—164. See also the succinct statement
in The Economic Basis of Politics (New York, 1922), pp. 66-67: "Under
the circumstances the framers of the Constitution relied, not upon direct
economic qualification, but upon checks and balances to secure the rights of
property—particularly personal property—against the assaults of the farmers
and the proletariat.” In Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American
Civilization (New York, 1927), the theme is continued: "Almost unanimous
was the opinion that democracy was a dangerous thing, to be restrained,
not encouraged, by the Constitution, to be given as little voice as possible
in the new system, to be hampered by checks and balances.” (p. 315; cf. p.
326.) It was this position which the Beards had apparently abandoned by
the 1940's. The attitude of The Republic (1942), and of The Basic History
(1944), is one of appreciation of the authors of the Constitution, not con¬
demnation.
528 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
This interpretation, or variations of it, has been widely accepted,
though it has been frequently challenged both directly and in¬
directly. 3 Its tendency is to dispose of the institutional thought
of the men who framed the Constitution as ideological response
to economic interest. The present essay offers yet another chal¬
lenge to this position, not by further examination of the Consti¬
tution or its authors, but by analysis of the Anti-Federalist position
of 1787-1788.
Perhaps because theirs was the losing side, the political thought
of the Anti-Federalists has received much less attention than that
of the Founding Fathers. Since they fought the adoption of a
Constitution which they thought to be aristocratic in origin and
intent, and which by Beardian criteria was inherently anti-demo-
cratic in structure, there has been some tendency to characterize
them as spokesmen of eighteenth-century democracy. But their
theory of republican government has never been closely analyzed,
nor have the areas of agreement and disagreement between them
and the Federalists been carefully defined. It is the purpose of
this essay to explore these topics. A very large proportion of the
people in 1787—1788 were Anti-Federalists, and a knowledge of
their ideas and attitudes is essential to an understanding of
American political thought in the formative years of the republic.
Implicit in this purpose is the thesis that the ideological context
of the Constitution was as important in determining its form as
were the economic interests and motivations of its framers, and
that the failure of Beard and his followers to examine this con¬
text has rendered their interpretation of the Constitution and its
origin necessary partial and unrealistic.
Beard's conclusions rested on two assumptions or arguments.
One was that the framers of the Constitution were motivated by
3 In 1936 Maurice Blinkoff published a study of the influence of Beard on
American historiography and came to the conclusion that authors of college
history textbooks had adopted Beard’s views “with virtual unanimity.” The
Influence of Charles A. Beard upon American Historiography , University of
Buffalo Studies, XII (May, 1936), p. 36. I have not conducted a compre¬
hensive survey, but it seems to me that BlinkofFs conclusions would prob¬
ably not be accurate for today.
For ^ challenges to the Beard position, the reader may consult the survey
of reviews of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution cited in Blink-
off, as well as some of the selections in the Amherst Problems in American
Civilization series; Earl Latham, editor, The Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution (Boston, 1949), though this collection is, in the opinion
of the author, biased in favor of the Beard interpretation. See also B. F.
Wright, The Origin of Separation of Powers in America,” Economica, May,
1933 i a 11 ** “The Federalist on the Nature of Political Man,” Ethics, Vol. LIX,
No. 2, Part II (January, 1949); and Douglass Adair, “The Tenth Federalist
Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. VIII (January, 1951).
CECELIA M. KENYON 529
their class and perhaps their personal economic interests; a great
deal of evidence, drawn from more or less contemporary records,
was presented to support this part of the thesis. A second assump¬
tion was that the system of separation of powers and checks and
balances written into the Constitution was undemocratic. In
making this second assumption Beard was more influenced by
the ideas of the Populist and Progressive movements of his own
time, I think, than by a study of the political beliefs current in
1787. He was preoccupied in 1913 with his period’s interest in
reforming the structure of the national government to make it
more democratic, which by his standards meant more responsible
to simple majority rule. Thus he judged an eighteenth-century
frame of government by a twentieth-century political doctrine.
The effect was to suggest by implication that the men who in
1787—1788 thought the Constitution aristocratic and antagonistic
to popular government thought so for the same reasons as Beard. 4
The evidence shows clearly that their reasons were frequently and
substantially different. These differences serve to illuminate the
context of the Constitution and to illustrate the evolutionary
character of American political thought.
II
At the center of the theoretical expression of Anti-Federalist
opposition to increased centralization of power in the national
government was the belief that republican government was pos¬
sible only for a relatively small territory and a relatively small
4There is no doubt at all that many of the Anti-Federalists did regard the
Constitution as dangerous and aristocratic, and its framers and supporters
likewise. They were acutely suspicious of it because of its class origin and
were on the lookout for every evidence of bias in favor of the "aristocrats”
who framed it. Note, for example, the attitude of Amos Singletary expressed
in the Massachusetts ratifying convention: “These lawyers, and men of
learning and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so
smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect
to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be managers of this Constitu¬
tion, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then
they will swallow up all us little folks like the great Leviathan; yes, just
as the whale swallowed up Jonah!” Jonathan Elliot, The Debates in Several
State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recom¬
mended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, in 1787, Second Edition,
5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896), II, p. 102. See also reference to this attitude
in a letter from Rufus King to James Madison, January 27, 1788. This letter
is to be found in the Documentary History of the Constitution of the United
States of America, 1786-1870 (Washington, 1894-1905), 5 vols.; IV, p. 459.
A similar feeling was reported to exist in the New Hampshire convention.
See John Langdon to George Washington, February 28, 1788, ibid., p. 524.
53° REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
and homogeneous population. James Winthrop of Massachusetts
expressed a common belief when he said, “The idea of an un¬
compounded republick, on an average one thousand miles in
length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions
of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals,
of habits, and of laws, is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to
the whole experience of mankind.” 5 The last part of this statement,
at least, was true; history was on the side of the Anti-Federalists.
So was the authority of contemporary political thought. The name
of Montesquieu carried great weight, and he had taught that
republican governments were appropriate for small territories
only. He was cited frequently, but his opinion would probably
not have been accepted had it not reflected their own experience
and inclinations. As colonials they had enjoyed self-government
in colony-size packages only and had not sought to extend its
operation empire-wise. It is significant that the various proposals
for colonial representation in Parliament never grew deep roots
during the debate preceding the Revolution. This association of
self-government with relatively small geographical units rein¬
forced Montesquieu’s doctrine and led to further generalizations.
A large republic was impossible, it was argued, because the center
of government must necessarily be distant from the people. Their
interest would then naturally decrease; and when this happened,
it would not suit the genius of the people to assist in the govern¬
ment,” and “Nothing would support the government, in such a
case as that, but military coercion.” 6 Patrick Henry argued that
republican government for a continent was impossible because it
was “a work too great for human wisdom.” 7
Associated with the argument regarding size was the assump¬
tion that any people who were to govern themselves must be
relatively homogeneous in interest, opinion, habits, and mores.
The theme was not systematically explored, but it apparently
stemmed from the political relativism prevalent at the time, 8 and
B The Agrtppa Letters in Paul Leicester Ford, Essays on the Constitution
of the United States (Brooklyn, 1892), p. 65. See also pp. 91-92.
8 EUiot, IV, p. 52.
’Elliot, III, p. 164; cf. in, pp. 607 fE.; II, pp. 69, 335; the Centinel Letters
m John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, editors, Pennsylvania and
the Federal Constitution, 1787—1788 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
1888), p. 572; R. H. Lee, '‘Letters of a Federal Farmer,” in Paul Leicester
Ford, Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, 1888),
p. 288; George Clinton, Cato, in Ford, Essays, pp. 256 ff.
'Political relativism had long been a part of the colonial heritage. Seven-
*^^ entury ^^^tans, who were sure that God had regulated many aspects
of life with remarkable precision, believed that He had left each people
CECELIA M. KENYON 531
from the recent experience of conflicts of interest between the
colonies and Great Britain, and later between various states and
sections of the new confederation.
It is not easy to measure the relative strength of national and
state sentiment in either individuals or groups, 9 but it is clear that
the Anti-Federalists were conscious of, and emphasized, the cul¬
tural diversity of the peoples in the thirteen states. They argued
that no one set of laws could operate over such diversity. Said a
Southerner, “We see plainly that men who come from New
England are different from us.” 10 He did not wish to be governed
either with or by such men. Neither did the New Englanders
wish to share a political roof with Southerners. “The inhabitants
of warmer climates are more dissolute in their manners, and less
industrious, than in colder countries. A degree of severity is,
therefore, necessary with one which would cramp the spirit of
the other. . . . It is impossible for one code of laws to suit Georgia
and Massachusetts.” 11 To place both types of men under the same
government would be abhorrent and quite incompatible with the
retention of liberty. Either the new government would collapse,
or it would endeavor to stamp out diversity and level all citizens
to a new uniformity in order to survive. Such was the reasoning
of the leading New England publicist, James Winthrop. His in¬
debtedness to Montesquieu is obvious. His failure to grasp the
principles of the new federalism is also clear; for the purposes of
this argument, and indeed for almost all of their arguments, he
and his colleagues refused to consider the proposed government
as one of limited, enumerated powers. They constantly spoke and
wrote as if the scope and extent of its powers would be the same
as those of the respective state governments, or of a unified
national government. 12
In addition to the absence of cultural homogeneity, the Anti-
Federalists emphasized the clash of specific economic and political
considerable freedom in the choice of their form of government. The
secularized legacy of this belief prevailed throughout the era of framing
state and national constitutions. Fundamental principles derived from
natural law were of course universally valid, and certain “political ma xim s”
regarding the structure of the government very nearly so, but the embodi¬
ment of these general truths in concrete political forms was necessarily
determined by the nature and circumstances of the people involved.
t? 11 ^ ls subject see John C. Ranney, “The Bases of American Federalism,”
William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., Vol. Ill, No. 1 (January, 1946).
10 Elliot, IV, p. 24.
^From the Agrippa Letters, Ford, Essays, p. 64.
1 Tt was this misunderstanding of the proposed new system which Madison
attempted to remove in Federalist 39.
53 2 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
interests. These were primarily sectional, 13 and were of more
acute concern in the South than in the North. In Virginia, for
example, George Mason expressed the fear that the power of
Congress to regulate commerce might be the South’s downfall.
In Philadelphia he had argued that this power be exercised by a
two-thirds majority, and he now feared that by requiring only a
simple majority “to make all commercial and navigation laws,
the five southern states (whose produce and circumstances are
totally different from those of the eight northern and eastern
states) will be ruined. . . .” 14 It was also argued in several of
the Southern conventions that a majority of the Eastern states
might conspire to close the Mississippi, 15 and that they might
eventually interfere with the institution of slavery. 16 In New
England and the Middle states, there was less feeling that the
interests of the entire section were in jeopardy, and therefore less
discussion of these concrete issues and their divisive effect. One
writer did strike out at the Federalist plea for a transcendent
nationalism and repudiated the notion of sacrificing local interests
to a presumed general interest as unrealistic and prejudicial
to freedom. “It is vain to tell us that we ought to overlook local
interests. It is only by protecting local concerns that the interest
of the whole is preserved.” He went on to say that men entered
into society for egoistic rather than altruistic motives, that having
once done so, all were bound to contribute equally to the common
welfare, and that to call for sacrifices of local interest was to
violate this principle of equality and to subvert “the foundation of
free government.” 17
There was much to be said for Winthrop’s argument. It was an
unequivocal statement of the principle that self-interest is the
primary bond of political union. It was also an expression of an
attitude which has always played a large part in our national
politics: a refusal to sacrifice—sometimes even to subordinate—
the welfare of a part to that of the whole. Pursuit of an abstract
national interest has sometimes proved dangerous, and there was
a healthy toughness in the Anti-Federalist insistence on the im-
18 Curiously enough, the Big-Little State fight, which almost broke up the
Convention, played very little part in the ratification debates. And ironically
one or the evidences of ideological unity which made the “more perfect
umon possible was the similarity of arguments put forth by the Anti-
* ederalists m their respective states.
:u “Objections,’ , Ford, Pamphlets, p. 331.
35 EUiot, HI, p. 326.
la Elliot, IV, pp. 272—273.
37 Agrippa Letters, Ford, Essays , p. 73.
CECELIA M. KENYON 533
portance of local interests. But Winthrop skirted around the really
difficult questions raised by his argument, which were also in¬
herent in the Anti-Federalist position that the size of the United
States and the diversity which existed among them were too
great to be consistent with one republican government operating
over the whole. No one would deny that a certain amount of
unity or consensus is required for the foundation of popular,
constitutional government; not very many people—now or in
1787—would go as far as Rousseau and insist on virtually abso¬
lute identity of interest and opinion. The Anti-Federalists were
surprisingly close to Rousseau and to the notions of republicanism
which influenced him, but they were sensible, practical men and
did not attempt to define their position precisely. Consequently
they left untouched two difficult questions: how much, and what
kind of unity is required for the foundation of any republican
government, large or small; and how, in the absence of perfect
uniformity, are differences of opinion and interest to be resolved?
Ill
The Anti-Federalist theory of representation was closely allied
to the belief that republican government could operate only over
a small area. The proposed Constitution provided that the first
House of Representatives should consist of sixty-five members,
and that afterwards the ratio of representation should not exceed
one representative for thirty thousand people. This provision was
vigorously criticized and was the chief component of the charge
that the Constitution was not sufficiently democratic. The argu¬
ment was two-fold: first, that sixty-five men could not possibly
represent the multiplicity of interests spread throughout so great
a country; second, that those most likely to be left out would be
of the more democratic or "middling” elements in society. The
minority who voted against ratification in the Pennsylvania Con¬
vention calculated that the combined quorums of the House and
Senate was only twenty-five, and concluded that this number plus
the President could not possibly represent "the sense and views
of three or four millions of people, diffused over so extensive a
territory, comprising such various climates, products, habits, in¬
terests, and opinions. . . .” 18 This argument, accompanied with
““Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of
Pennsylvania to their Constituents,” reprinted in McMaster and Stone
Pennsylvania and the Constitution , p. 472.
534 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
the same calculus, was repeated many times during the ratifi¬
cation debate.
Almost all of the leaders of the opposition laid down what they
believed to be the requisites of adequate representation, and there
is a remarkable similarity in their definitions. George Mason,
speaking in the Virginia Convention against giving the central
government the power of taxation, based his argument on the
inadequacy of representation as measured by his criteria: "To
make representation real and actual, the number of representa¬
tives ought to be adequate; they ought to mix with the people,
think as they think, feel as they feel,—ought to be perfectly
amenable to them, and thoroughly acquainted with their interest
and condition.” 19 In his Letters of a Federal Farmer, Richard
Henry Lee developed the same idea further:
... a full and equal representation is that which possesses the same
interests, feelings, opinions, and views the people themselves would
were they all assembled—a fair representation, therefore, should be
so regulated, that every order of men in the community, according to
the common course of elections, can have a share in it—in order to
allow professional men, merchants, traders, farmers, mechanics, etc.
to bring a just proportion of their best informed men respectively into
the legislature, the representation must be considerably numerous . 20
It was the contention of the Anti-Federalists that because of
the small size of the House of Representatives, the middle and
lower orders in society would not be elected to that body, and that
consequently this, the only popular organ of the government,
would not be democratic at all. It would, instead, be filled by
aristocrats, possibly by military heroes and demagogues. 21 Why
should this be? Lee asserted simply that it would be "in the nature
of things.” Mason seems to have assumed it without any comment
or argument. Patrick Henry reasoned that since the candidates
would be chosen from large electoral districts rather than from
counties, they would not all be known by the electors, and "A
common man must ask a man of influence how he is to proceed,
and for whom he must vote. The elected, therefore, will be care¬
less of the interest of the electors. It will be a common job to
^Elliot, in, p. 32.
^Ford, Pamphlets, pp. 288-289.
a This idea appeared frequently in Anti-Federalist arguments. See, for
example, the "Address and Dissent of the Minority. . . ,” McMaster and
Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution , pp. 472, 479; Lee, "Letters of a
Federal Fanner,” Ford, Pamphlets , p. 295; Elliot, IH, pp. 266-267, 426
(George Mason).
CECELIA M. KENYON 535
extort the suffrages of the common people for the most influential
characters.” 22 This argument reflects one of the basic fears of
the Anti-Federalists: loss of personal, direct contact with and
knowledge of their representatives. They sensed quite accurately
that an enlargement of the area of republican government would
lead to a more impersonal system, and that the immediate, indi¬
vidual influence of each voter over his representative would be
lessened.
The most elaborate explanation of the anticipated results of
the electoral process was given by the moderate Anti-Federalist
in New York, Melancton Smith. He argued that very few men of
the “middling” class would choose to run for Congress, because
the office would be “highly elevated and distinguished,” the style
of living probably “high.” Such circumstances would “render the
place of a representative not a desirable one to sensible, sub¬
stantial men, who have been used to walking in the plain and
frugal paths of life.” Even if such should choose to run for
election, they would almost certainly be defeated. In a large
electoral district it would be difficult for any but a person of
“conspicuous military, popular, civil, or legal talents” Xo win. The
common people were more likely to be divided among themselves
than the great, and 'There will be scarcely a chance to their
uniting in any other but some great man, unless in some popular
demagogue, who will probably be destitute of principle. A sub¬
stantial yeoman, of sense and discernment, will hardly ever be
chosen.” 23 Consequently, the government would be controlled by
the great, would not truly reflect the interests of all groups in
the community, and would almost certainly become oppressive.
Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts were also uneasy about the
capacity of the people to elect a legislature which would reflect
their opinions and interests. The arguments emphasized geo¬
graphical as well as class divisions, and expressed the fear and
suspicion felt by the western part of the state toward Boston
and the other coastal towns. It was predicted that the latter would
enjoy a great advantage under the new system, and this prediction
was supported by a shrewd analysis in the Cornelius Letter:
The citizens in the seaport towns are numerous; they live compact;
their interests are one; there is a constant connection and intercourse
between them; they can, on any occasion, centre their votes where
they please. This is not the case with those who are in the landed
22 Elliot, m, p. 322.
Elliot, II, p. 246.
536 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
interest; they are scattered far and wide; they have but little inter¬
course and connection with each other. To concert uniform plans for
carrying elections of this kind is entirely out of their way. Hence,
their votes if given at all, will be no less scattered than are the local
situations of the voters themselves. Wherever the seaport towns agree
to centre their votes, there will, of course, be the greatest number. A
gentleman in the country therefore, who may aspire after a seat in
Congress, or who may wish for a post of profit under the federal
government, must form his connections, and unite his interest with
those towns. Thus, I conceive, a foundation is laid for throwing the
whole power of the federal government into the hands of those who
are in the mercantile interest; and for the landed, which is the great
interest of this country to lie unrepresented, forlorn and without hope . 24
What the Anti-Federalists feared, in other words, was the
superior opportunities for organized voting which they felt to be
inherent in the more thickly populated areas. They shared with
the authors of The Federalist the fear of party and faction in the
eighteenth-century American sense of those words. But they also
feared, as the preceding analyses show, the essence of party in
its modern meaning, i.e., organizing the vote, and they wanted
constituencies sufficiently small to render such organization un¬
necessary.
This belief that larger electoral districts would inevitably be
to the advantage of the well-to-do partially explains the almost
complete lack of criticism of the indirect election of the Senate
and the President. If the “middling” class could not be expected
to compete successfully with the upper class in Congressional
elections, still less could they do so in statewide or nation-wide
elections. It was a matter where size was of the essence. True
representation—undistorted by party organization—could be
achieved only where electoral districts were small.
IV
The conception of the representative body as a true and faithful
miniature of the people themselves was the projection of an ideal
almost a poetic one. Very few of its proponents thought it could
actually be realized. In the Anti-Federalist attack on the Consti¬
tution, it served as a foil for an extraordinary picture of antici-
^The Cornelius Letter is reprinted in Samuel Bannister Harding, The
Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of
Massachusetts (New York, 1896). See pp. 123-124.
CECELIA M. KENYON 537
pated treachery on the part of the representatives to be elected
under the proposed government. No distinction was made on the
basis of their method of election, whether directly or indirectly
by the people. All were regarded as potential tyrants.
This attack stemmed directly from the Anti-Federalist concep¬
tion of human nature. They shared with their opponents many
of the assumptions regarding the nature of man characteristic
of American thought in the late eighteenth century. They took
for granted that the dominant motive of human behavior was self-
interest, and that this drive found its most extreme political ex¬
pression in an insatiable lust for power. These were precisely the
characteristics with which the authors of The Federalist Papers
were preoccupied. 25 Yet the Anti-Federalists chided the Federalists
for their excessive confidence in the future virtue of elected offi¬
cials, and criticized the Constitution for its failure to provide
adequate protection against the operation of these tyrannical
drives. There is surely an amusing irony to find the Founding
Fathers, who prided themselves on their realism, and who enjoy
an enviable reputation for that quality today, taken to task for
excessive optimism. But they had to meet this charge again and
again. Thus Caldwell in the North Carolina Convention found it
“remarkable,—that gentlemen, as an answer to every improper
part of it [the Constitution], tell us that every thing is to be done
by our own representatives, who are to be good men. There is
no security that they will be so, or continue to be so.” 26 In New
York Robert Lansing expressed the same feeling in a passage
strikingly reminiscent of the famous paragraph in Madison's
Federalist 51:
Scruples would be impertinent, arguments would be in vain, checks
would be useless, if we were certain our rulers would be good men;
but for the virtuous government is not instituted: its object is to re¬
strain and punish vice; and all free constitutions are formed with two
views—to deter the governed from crime, and the governors from
tyranny. 2 7
^See B. F. Wright, “The Federalist on the Nature of Political Man,” Ethics
(January, 1949).
^Elliot, IV, p. 187; cf. pp. 203-204, and III, p. 494. Caldwell’s statement
is very similar to Madison’s comment in Federalist 10: “It is in vain to say
that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests and
render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will
not always be at the helm.”
Elliot, II, pp. 295-296. Madison’s declaration was this: “But what is
government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If
men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to
govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be
53B REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
This and many other similar statements might have been used
interchangeably by either side in the debate, for they symbolized
an attitude deeply embedded and widely dispersed in the political
consciousness of the age. There were frequent references to “the
natural lust of power so inherent in man”; 28 to “the predominant
thirst of dominion which has invariably and uniformly prompted
rulers to abuse their power”; 29 to “the ambition of man, and his
lust for domination”; 30 to rulers who would be “men of like
passions,” having “the same spontaneous inherent thirst for power
with ourselves.” 31 In Massachusetts, another delegate said, “we
ought to be jealous of rulers. All the godly men we read of have
failed; nay, he would not trust a "flock of Moseses/ ” 32
It is to be noted that this dreadful lust for power was regarded
as a universal characteristic of the nature of man, which could
be controlled but not eradicated. The Anti-Federalists charged
that the authors of the Constitution had failed to put up strong
enough barriers to block this inevitably corrupting and tyrannical
force. They painted a very black picture indeed of what the
national representatives might and probably would do with the
unchecked power conferred upon them under the provisions of
the new Constitution. The “parade of imaginary horribles” has
become an honorable and dependable technique of political de¬
bate, but the marvelous inventiveness of the Anti-Federalists has
rarely been matched. Certainly the best achievements of their
contemporary opponents were conspicuously inferior in dramatic
quality, as well as incredibly unimaginative in dull adherence
to at least a semblance of reality. The anticipated abuses of
power, some real, some undoubtedly conjured as ammunition for
debate, composed a substantial part of the case against the Consti¬
tution, and they must be examined in order to get at the temper
and quality of Anti-Federalist thought as well as at its content.
Their source was ordinarily a distorted interpretation of some
particular clause.
One clause which was believed to lay down a constitutional
road to legislative tyranny was Article I, Section 4: “The times.
necessary. In framing a government which is to he administered by men
over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the govern¬
ment to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control
itself.”
^Mason in Virginia, Elliot, III, p. 32.
^Henry in Virginia, ibid., p. 436.
^‘Letters of Luther Martin,” Ford, Essays , p. 379.
31 RarreU in Massachusetts, Elliot, II, p. 159.
32 White in Massachusetts, Elliot, II, p. 28.
CECELIA M. KENYON 539
places, and manner of holding elections for senators and repre¬
sentatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature
thereof; but the Congress may, at any time, by law, make or
alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing sena¬
tors.” Here was the death clause of republican government.
“This clause may destroy representation entirely,” said Timothy
Bloodworth of North Carolina. 33 If Congress had power to alter
the times of elections, Congress might extend its tenure of office
from two years to four, six, eight, ten, twenty, “or even for their
natural lives.” 34 Bloodworth and his colleagues feared the worst.
In Massachusetts, where debate over this clause occupied a day
and a half, the primary fear was that Congress, by altering the
places of election, might rig them so as to interfere with a full
and free expression of the people’s choice. Pierce suggested that
Congress could “direct that the election for Massachusetts shall
be held in Boston,” and then by pre-election caucus, Boston and
the surrounding towns could agree on a ticket “and carry their
list by a major vote.” 35 In the same state the delegate who would
not trust “a flock of Moseses” argued thus: “Suppose the Congress
should say that none should be electors but those worth 50 or a
£100 sterling; cannot they do it? Yes, said he, they can; and if
any lawyer . . . can beat me out of it, I will give him ten
guineas.” 36 In Virginia, George Mason suggested that Congress
might provide that the election in Virginia should be held only
in Norfolk County, or even “go farther, and say that the election
for all the states might be had in New York. . . ” 37 Patrick Henry
warned, “According to the mode prescribed, Congress may tell
you that they have a right to make the vote of one gentleman go
as far as the votes of a hundred poor men.” 38
Any of these acts would have been a flagrant abuse of power,
but no more so than that which Mason and others predicted under
Article II, Section 2, which gave to the President the power to
make treaties with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the
senators present. This power was believed to be fraught with
danger, particularly among Southerners, who feared that the
majority of Northern states might use it to give up American
^Elliot, IV, p. 55.
’“Elliot, IV, pp. 51-52, 55-56, 62-63, 87-88.
Elliot, II, p. 22.
^Elliot, II, p. 28.
37 EHiot, III, pp. 403-404.
^Elliot, 331, p. 175. Cf. Centinel, McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and
the Constitution , p. 598, and James Winthrop in the Agrippa Letters, Ford,
Essays , p. 105.
540 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
rights of navigation on the Mississippi. The North would not have
a two-thirds majority of the entire Senate, of course, but Mason
suggested that when a “partial” treaty was involved, the President
would not call into session senators from distant states, or those
whose interests would be affected adversely, but only those he
knew to be in favor of it. 39 His colleague, William Grayson, sug¬
gested the similarly treacherous prospect of such a treaty's being
rushed through while members from the Southern states were
momentarily absent from the floor of the Senate: “If the senators
of the Southern States be gone but one hour, a treaty may be
made by the rest. . . .” 40
This fear at least had some foundation in fact—there was a
conflict of interest between North and South over the Mississippi.
It would seem that the fear expressed in North Carolina by
Abbott on behalf of “the religious part of the society” was pure
fantasy: “It is feared by some people, that, by the power of mak¬
ing treaties, they might make a treaty engaging with foreign
powers to adopt the Roman Catholic religion in the United
States. . . .” 41
This was not the only provision objected to by “the religious
part of the society.” They were greatly displeased with the last
clause of Article VI, Section 3: "hut no religious test shall ever
be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under
the United States.” In the same speech quoted above, Abbott re¬
ported, presumably on behalf of his constituents, “The exclusion
of religious tests is by many thought dangerous and impolitic.”
For without such, “They suppose . . . pagans, deists, and Ma¬
hometans might obtain offices among us, and that the senators
and representatives might afl be pagans.” 42 David Caldwell thought
that the lack of a religious qualification constituted “an invitation
for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us,” and that
since the Christian religion was acknowledged to be the best for
making “good members of society . . . those gentlemen who
formed this Constitution should not have given this invitation to
Jews and heathens.' 43 Federalist James Iredell reported a pamphlet
in circulation “in which the author states, as a very serious danger,
•Elliot, HI, p. 499.
"’Elliot, HI, p. 502.
"Elliot, IV, pp. 191-192. Abbot was not an Anti-Federalist, but was, ac-
L Trenholme, in The Ratification of the Federal Constitution in
North Carolina (New York, 1932), something of an independent. See p. 178.
He voted for ratification.
42 Elliot, IV, p. 192.
a Ibid. } p. 199.
CECELIA M. KENYON 541
that the pope of Rome might be elected President.” 44 This unwit¬
tingly placed fresh ammunition at the disposal of the opposition.
An Anti-Federalist admitted that he had not at first perceived this
danger and conceded that it was not an immediate one. “But,”
said he, ‘let us remember that we form a government for millions
not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course
of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work.
This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and
Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it. There is a
disqualification, I believe, in every state in the Union—it ought
to be so in this system.” 45
It is to be noted that these fears were fears of the majority of
electors as well as of their elected representatives, and that these
statements can hardly be said to glow with the spirit of liberty
and tolerance. These beliefs were undoubtedly not shared by all
Anti-Federalists, but they would not have been expressed so
vigorously in the convention debates had they not represented a
sizeable segment of constituent opinion.
Another provision severely and dramatically criticized was that
which gave to Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the future
site of the national capital and other property to be purchased
for forts, arsenals, dockyards, and the like. 46 It was predicted
that the ten-mile square area would become an enormous den of
tyranny and iniquity. In New York George Clinton warned “that
the ten miles square . . . would be the asylum of the base, idle,
avaricious and ambitious. . . .” 47 In Virginia Patrick Henry pointed
out that this provision, combined with the necessary and proper
clause, gave Congress a right to pass “any law that may facilitate
the execution of their acts,” and within the specified area to hang
“any man who shall act contrary to their commands . . . without
benefit of clergy.” 48 George Mason argued that the place would
“Ibid., p. 195.
45 Ibid ., p. 215. This quotation transmits a sense of the method of Anti-
Federalist debate admirably. A similar statement by Amos Singletary of
Massachusetts gives something of the flavor of the th inkin g done by the
honest and pious patriots of the back country, in which opposition to the
Constitution was strong: “The Hon. Mr. Singletary thought we were giving
up all our privileges, as there was no provision that men in power should
have any religion, and though he hoped to see Christians, yet by the Con¬
stitution, a Papist, or an Infidel, was as eligible as they. It had been said
that men had not degenerated; he did not think that men were better now
than when men after God’s own heart did wickedly. He thought, in this
instance, we were giving great power to we know not whom.” Elliot, II, p. 44.
18 Article I, Section 8.
47 The Cato Letters; reprinted in Ford, Essays, p. 265.
^Elliot, IH, p. 436.
542 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
make a perfect lair for hit-and-run tyrants. For if any of the
government's “officers, or creatures, should attempt to oppress the
people, or should actually perpetuate the blackest deed, he has
nothing to do but get into the ten miles square. Why was this
dangerous power given?” 49 One man observed that the Consti¬
tution did not specify the location of this site, and that therefore
Congress was perfectly free to seat itself and the other offices of
government in Peking. All in all, a terrible prospect: the Pope as
President, operating from a base in Peking, superintending a
series of hangings without benefit of clergy! Or worse.
There was no bill of rights in the Constitution. This caused
genuine fear for the security of some of the liberties thus left
unprotected. The fear itself, though real and well founded, fre¬
quently found expression in melodramatically picturesque terms.
The Anti-Federalists sometimes mentioned freedom of the press
and freedom of conscience, 50 but they were primarily preoccupied
with the failure of the Constitution to lay down the precious and
venerable common-law rules of criminal procedure. The Consti¬
tution guaranteed the right of trial by jury in all criminal cases 51
except impeachment, but it did not list the procedural safeguards
associated with that right. There was no specification that the
trial should be not merely in the state but in the vicinity where
the crime was committed (which was habitually identified with
the neighborhood of the accused); there were no provisions made
for the selection of the jury or of the procedure to be followed;
there were no guarantees of the right to counsel, of the right not
to incriminate oneself; there was no prohibition against cruel
and unusual punishments. In short, there were few safeguards
upon which the citizen accused of crime could rely. 52 Apprehen-
**Ibid., p. 431.
“The expressed fear that Roman Catholicism might be established by treaty
did not reflect any strong belief in religious freedom. It was nothing more
than simple anti-Catholicism, as the remarks about the lack of a religious
qualification for office-holding clearly indicate. On the other hand, there
was some concern expressed in Pennsylvania over the rights of conscien¬
tious objectors to military service. See McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania
and the Constitution , pp. 480-481.
51 Article HI, Section 2. The Constitution made no provision for jury trial
in civil cases, because different procedures in the several states had made
the formulation of a general method difficult. The Anti-Federalists leaped
to the conclusion that the lack of a written guarantee of this right meant
certain deprivation of it, and they professed to be thoroughly alarmed. But
their primary fear centered around what they regarded as the inadequate
guarantees of the right of trial by jury in criminal cases.
“If George Washington’s word is to be trusted, the actions of the Found¬
ing Fathers with respect to trial by jury and a bill of rights did not stem
from any sinister motives. In a letter to Lafayette on April 28, 1788, he
CECELIA M. KENYON 543
sion concerning the latitude left to Congress in this matter was
expressed in several conventions; 53 it was Holmes of Massachu¬
setts who painted the most vivid and fearful picture of the pos¬
sible fate of the unfortunate citizen who ran afoul of federal law.
Such an individual might be taken away and tried by strangers
far from home; his jury might be handpicked by the sheriff, or
hold office for life; there was no guarantee that indictment should
be by grand jury only, hence it might be by information of the
attorney-general, “in consequence of which the most innocent
person in the commonwealth may be . . . dragged from his home,
his friends, his acquaintance, and confined in prison. . . “On
the whole,” said Holmes, . . we shall find Congress possessed
of powers enabling them to institute judicatories little less inaus¬
picious than a certain tribunal in Spain, which has long been the
disgrace of Christendom: I mean that diabolical institution, the
Inquisition. . . . They are nowhere restrained from inventing the
most cruel and unheard-of punishments and annexing them to
crimes; and there is no constitutional check on them, but that
racks and gibbets may be amongst the most mild instruments of
their discipline.” 54
Should Congress have attempted any of these actions, it would
have amounted to a virtual coup detat and a repudiation of re¬
publicanism. 55 The advocates of the Constitution argued that such
abuse of power could not reasonably be expected on the part of
representatives elected by the people themselves. This argument
gave this explanation: . . There was not a member of the convention, 1
believe, who had the least objection to what is contended for by the Advo¬
cates for a Bill of Rights and Tryal by Jury. The first, where the people
evidently retained everything which they did not in express terms give up,
was considered nugatory. . . . And as to the second, it was only the diffi¬
culty of establishing a mode which should not interfere with the fixed
modes of any of the States, that induced the Convention to leave it, as a
matter of future adjustment.” Documentary History of the Constitution ,
Vol. IV, pp. 601-602.
“In New York, see Elliot, II, p. 400; Virginia, III, pp. 523 ff., North
Carolina, IV, pp. 143, 150, 154-155.
^Elliot, II, pp. 109-111.
“This method of arguing drove the Federalists to exasperation more than
once, as when one delegate in the Virginia Convention, an infrequent
speaker, lost patience with Patrick Henry’s “bugbears of hobgoblins” and
su gg es ted that ”If the gentleman does not like this government, let him go
and live among the Indians.” Elliot, III, p. 580; cf. pp. 632, 644. Also note
the reporter’s tongue-in-cheek note on Henry’s opposition to the President’s
power of Commander-in-Chief: “Here Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically
expatiated on the probability of the President’s enslaving America, and the
horrid consequences that must result.” Ibid., p. 60. But Henry, who was
so good at this technique himself, attacked it in his opponents. See ibid.,
p. 140.
544 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
was not satisfactory to the Anti-Federalists. They reiterated again
and again the universal perfidy of man, especially men entrusted
with political power, and emphasized the necessity of providing
adequate protection against manifestations of human depravity.
They charged that the authors and advocates of the Constitution
were about to risk their liberties and those of all of the people
on the slim possibility that the men to be elected to office in the
new government would be, and would always be, good men. 56
The Federalists also argued that election would serve as a
check, since the people could remove unfaithful or unsatisfactory
representatives, and since knowledge of this would make the
latter refrain from incurring the displeasure of their constituents.
This argument was flatly rejected. Patrick Henry stated his position
emphatically during the course of his objection to Congressional
power of taxation:
I shall be told in this place, that those who are to tax us are our
representatives. To this I answer, that there is no real check to prevent
their ruining us. There is no actual responsibility. The only semblance
of a check is the negative power of not re-electing them. This, sir, is
but a feeble barrier, when their personal interest, their ambition and
avarice, come to be put in contrast with the happiness of the people.
All checks founded on anything but self-love, will not avail. 57
In North Carolina the same opinion was expressed in a rather
remarkable interchange. Taylor objected to the method of im¬
peachment on the ground that since the House of Representatives
drew up the bill of indictment, and the Senate acted upon it, the
members of Congress themselves would be virtually immune to
this procedure. Governor Johnston answered that impeachment
was not an appropriate remedy for legislative misrule, and that
U A representative is answerable to no power but his constituents.
He is accountable to no being under heaven but the people who
appointed him.” To this, Taylor responded simply, "that it now
appeared to him in a still worse light than before.” 58 Johnston
stated one of the great principles of representative government;
it merely deepened Taylor’s fear of Congress. He and his fellow
Anti-Federalists strongly wished for what Madison had referred
to as auxiliary precautions” against possible acts of legislative
tyranny.
^See above, pp. 13-15.
57 Elliot, III, p. 167; cf. p. 327.
“Elliot, IV, pp. 32-34.
CECELIA M. KENYON 545
V
These additional safeguards were of two kinds: more explicit
limitations written into the Constitution, and more institutional
checks to enforce these limitations.
In recent years the Constitution has been much admired for its
brevity, its generality, its freedom from the minutiae which char¬
acterized nineteenth-century constitutions. These qualities were
feared and not admired by the Anti-Federalists. They wanted
detailed explicitness which would confine the discretion of Con¬
gressional majorities within narrow boundaries. One critic com¬
plained of “a certain darkness, duplicity and studied ambiguity of
expression running through the whole Constitution. . . ” 59 An¬
other said that ‘lie did not believe there existed a social compact
on the face of the earth so vague and so indefinite as the one
now on the table .” 60 A North Carolinian demanded to know, “Why
not use expressions that were clear and unequivocal ?” 61 Later,
he warned, “Without the most express restrictions. Congress may
trample on your rights .” 62 Williams of New York expressed the
general feeling when he said in that state’s convention, “I am, sir,
for certainty in the establishment of a constitution which is not
only to operate upon us, but upon millions yet unborn .” 63 These
men wanted everything down in black and white, with no latitude
of discretion or interpretation left to their representatives in
Congress. It was an attitude which anticipated the later trend
toward lengthy constitutions filled with innumerable and minute
restrictions on the legislatures.
To no avail did the Federalists argue that if future representa¬
tives should indeed prove to be so treacherous and tyrannical as
to commit the horrible deeds suggested, then mere guarantees on
paper would not stop them for a minute. It is easy to call the
Anti-Federalist attitude unrealistic, but to do so is to miss a large
part of its significance. Like the Founding Fathers, like all men
Thomas B. Wait to George Thatcher, January 8 , 1788, in “The Thatcher
Papers,” selected from the papers of Hon. George Thatcher, and communi¬
cated by Captain Goodwin, U.S.A., The Historical Magazine, November and
December, 1869 (Second Series, Vols. 15-16), No. V, p. 262.
"Elliot, m, p. 583.
fll EUiot, IV, p. 68 ; cf. pp. 70, 153, 154-155, 168.
nbid., p. 167.
"Elliot, II, p. 339.
54$ REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
of their age, they were great constitutionalists. They were also
first-generation republicans, still self-consciously so, and aware
that their precious form of government was as yet an experiment
and had not proved its capacity for endurance. Its greatest enemy
was man’s lust for power, and the only thing which could hold
this in check, they were convinced, was a carefully written and
properly constructed constitution. They placed even greater em¬
phasis on the structure of government than did the Founding
Fathers, and refused to take for granted, as the latter did, that
the “genius” of the country was republican, and that the behavior
of the men to be placed in office would in general be republican
also.
The Anti-Federalists wanted a more rigid system of separation
of powers, more numerous and more effective checks and bal¬
ances, than the Founding Fathers had provided . 64 They thought
this elementary principle of good government, this “political
maxim,” had been violated, and that corruption leading to tyranny
would be the inevitable result. That the doctrine celebrated by
Montesquieu did enjoy the status of “maxim” seems unquestion-
able. Violation of separation of powers was one of George Mason’s
major objections to the Constitution . 63 Richard Henry Lee made
the same protest , 66 and further lamented that there were no
checks in the formation of the government, to secure the rights
of the people against the usurpations of those they appoint to
govern. . . .” 67 James Monroe said that he could “see no real
checks in it. 68 It is no wonder that an obscure member of the
Virginia Convention, when he rose with great diffidence to make
his only speech, chose safe and familiar ground to cover:
That the legislative, executive, and judicial powers should be sepa-
rate and distinct, in all free governments, is a political fact so well
established, that I presume I shall not be thought arrogant, when I
affirm that no country ever did, or ever can, long remain free, where
they are blended. All the states have been in this sentiment when they
. Thus in The Federalist 47, Madison felt obliged to defend the Constitu¬
tion against this charge. This was first pointed out to me by B. F. Wright
was the origin of the present essay. See the discussion in his article
The Federalist on the Nature of Political Man,” Ethics (January, 1949),
especially pp. 7 fi.
^“Objections of the Hon. George Mason, to the proposed Federal Consti¬
tution. Addressed to the Citizens of Virginia.”’ Ford, Pamphlets, p. 330.
^“Letters of a Federal Farmer,” Ford, Pamphlets , p. 299.
* 7 lbid., p. 318.
cs Elliot, III, p. 219.
CECELIA M* KENYON 547
formed their state constitutions, and therefore have guarded against
the danger; and every schoolboy in politics must be convinced of the
propriety of the observation; and yet, by the proposed plan, the legis¬
lative and executive powers are closely united. . . .69
In Pennsylvania, whose Revolutionary state constitution had em¬
bodied very little of separation of powers, an apparent return to
Montesquieu’s doctrine led to criticism of the Constitution. In
the ratifying convention, one of the amendments submitted had
for its purpose “That the legislative, executive, and judicial powers
be kept separate. . . .” 7 « In that same state, the leading Anti-
Federalist pamphleteer “Centinel,” who is believed to have been
either George Bryan, a probable co-author of the 1776 Constitution
and formerly in sympathy with the ideas of Tom Paine on this
subject, or his son Samuel, now expressed himself in the usual
manner:
This mixture of the legislative and executive moreover highly tends
to corruption. The chief improvement in government, in modem times,
has been the complete separation of the great distinctions of power;
placing the legislative in different hands from those which hold the
executive; and again severing the judicial part from the ordinary
administrative. ‘‘When the legislative and executive powers (says
Montesquieu) are united in the same person, or in the same body of
magistrates, there can be no liberty.” 71
The Anti-Federalists were just as unequivocal about the inade¬
quacy of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. Patrick
Henry hit his top form when he took up the matter in Virginia:
“There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government.
What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope¬
dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contriv¬
ances?” 72 Later in the Convention he argued that what checks
there were had no practical value at all—for reasons which must
cloud his reputation as a spokesman for the masses imbued with
the radical spirit of Revolutionary democracy: “To me it appears
that there is no check in that government. The President, sena¬
tors, and representatives, all, immediately or mediately, are the
m Ibid., p. 608.
70 McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution, p. 423. See also
pp. 475-^77 for discussion back of this.
^McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution , p. 587.
72 EUiot, III, p. 54.
548 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
choice of the people.” 73 His views were echoed by his colleague,
William Grayson. 74
In New York, Melancton Smith returned to the subject several
times, arguing, because there would eventually be corruption in
Congress, “It is wise to multiply checks to a greater degree than
the present state of things requires.” 75 In Massachusetts James
Winthrop tied up the concept of separation of powers with checks
and balances very neatly. "It is now generally understood that it
is for the security of the people that the powers of the govern¬
ment should be lodged in different branches. By this means pub-
lick business will go on when they all agree, and stop when they
disagree. The advantage of checks in government is thus mani¬
fested where the concurrence of different branches is necessary
to the same act. . . .” 76
There can be little doubt that the Anti-Federalists were united
in their desire to put more checks on the new government. This
was natural, since they greatly feared it. Expressions of the
opposite opinion were extremely rare. Rawlins Lowndes in South
Carolina remarked casually and without elaboration that it was
possible to have too many checks on a government. 77 George
Clinton and the Pennsylvanian “Centinel” both warned that a
government might become so complex that the people could not
understand it, 78 but both men expressed the usual fear of abuse
™Ibid. 9 p. 164. He then went on to point out that the British House of
Lords constituted a check against both the King and the Commons, and
that this check was founded on "self-love,” i.e., the desire of the Lords to
protect their interests against attack from either of the other two branches
of the government. This consideration, he said, prevailed upon him “to
pronounce the British government superior, in this respect, to any govern¬
ment that ever was in any country. Compare this with your Congressional
checks. . . . Have you a resting-place like the British government? Where
is the rock of your salvation? . . . Where are your checks? You have no
hereditary nobility—an order of men to whom human eyes can be cast up
for relief; for, says the Constitution, there is no title of nobility to be
granted. . . . In the British government there are real balances and checks:
in this system there are only ideal balances.” Ibid., pp. 164-165.
7i Ibid., pp. 421, 563. Grayson also expressed his preference for a form
of government—if there was to be a national government at all—far less
popular than the one proposed. He favored one strikingly similar to the
plan Hamilton had suggested in Philadelphia, a president and senate elected
for life, and a lower house elected for a three-year term. See Elliot, III, p.
279.
ra Elliot, II, pp. 259, 315.
™Agrippa Letters in Ford, Essays, p. 116.
^Elliot, IV, pp. 308-309.
^Clinton’s Cato Letters in Ford, Essays, p. 257; Centinel in McMaster and
Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution, p. 569. "Centinel” expressed a
desire for a unicameral legislature.
CECELIA M. KENYON 549
of power, 79 and “Centinel” paid his respects to Montesquieu and
explicitly criticized the inadequacy of checks by the President or
the House of Representatives on the Senate. 80
Thus no one, so far as I have been able to discover, attacked
the general validity of the system of separation of powers and
checks and balances. The Anti-Federalists were staunch disciples
of Montesquieu on this subject, and they would have found quite
unacceptable J. Allen Smith’s dictum that ‘The system of checks
and balances must not be confused with democracy; it is opposed
to and cannot be reconciled with the theory of popular govern¬
ment/’ 81
Although there was much oratory about the Founding Fathers’
deviation from Montesquieu’s doctrine, there were surprisingly
few proposals for specific alterations in the structure of the new
government. Of these, the most important was a change in the
relationship between President and Senate. The latter’s share in
the treaty-making and appointing powers was believed to be a
dangerous blending of executive and legislative power which
ought to have been avoided. Possibly because of their recent mem¬
ory of the role of the colonial governor’s council, possibly because
there was no clear provision in the Constitution for an executive
cabinet or council, the Anti-Federalists saw the Senate very much
in the latter’s role and expected it to play a very active and
continuous part in giving advice to the President. This was clearly
contrary to the doctrine of the celebrated Montesquieu—at least
it seemed so to them.
The result would certainly be some form of joint Presidential-
Senatorial tyranny, it was argued, but as to which of the two
departments would be the stronger of the “partners in crime,”
the Anti-Federalists were not agreed. Patrick Henry said that the
President, with respect to the treaty-making power, “as distin¬
guished from the Senate, is nothing.” 82 Grayson, with the North-
South division in mind, predicted a quid pro quo alliance between
the President and “the seven Eastern states.” “He will accommo¬
date himself to their interests in forming treaties, and they will
continue him perpetually in office.” 83 Mason predicted a “mar¬
riage” between the President and Senate: “They will be continu-
TO Clinton in Ford, Essays , pp. 261, 266; Centinel in McMaster and Stone,
Pennsylvania and the Constitution, p. 617.
^McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution, pp. 586-5S7,
475-477.
81 T 'he Spirit of American Government (New York, 1907), p. 9.
Elliot, III, p. 353.
^Ihid.y p. 492.
550 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ally supporting and aiding each other: they will always consider
their interest as united. . . . The executive and legislative powers,
thus connected, will destroy all balances. . . .” 84 "Centinel” of
Pennsylvania also feared that the President would not be strong
enough to resist pressure from the Senate, and that he would
join with them as "the head of the aristocratic junto.” 85 Spencer
of North Carolina, in support of a remedy in which all of the
above men concurred, argued that with an advisory council en¬
tirely separate from the legislature, and chosen from the separate
states, the President "would have that independence which is
necessary to form the intended check upon the acts passed by the
legislature before they obtain the sanction of laws.” 86
Although the prevailing opinion thus seemed to be that the Presi¬
dent was not strong enough, there were some who believed that he
was too strong. George Clinton argued that the extensive powers
given to him, combined with his long tenure of office, gave him
both "power and time sufficient to ruin his country.” Furthermore,
since he had no proper council to assist him while the Senate was
recessed, he would be without advice, or get it from "minions and
favorites”—or "a great council of state will grow out of the prin¬
cipal officers of the great departments, the most dangerous council
in a free country.” 87
One man in North Carolina, the only one to the best of my
knowledge, departed from the ordinary Anti-Federalist line of
attack and criticized the executive veto from a clear majoritarian
position. It was Lancaster, who projected the hypothetical case
of a bill which passed the House of Representatives unanimously,
the Senate by a large majority, was vetoed by the President and
returned to the Senate, where it failed to get a two-thirds vote.
The House would never see it again, said Mr. Lancaster, and
thus, "This is giving a power to the President to overrule fifteen
members of the Senate and every member of the House of Rep¬
resentatives.” 88
Except for Lancaster, most Anti-Federalists feared the Senate
more than the President, but all feared the two in combination
and wanted some checks against them. The separate advisory
council for the President was one, and shorter terms and/or
compulsory rotation for Senators and President, plus the power
u Ibid., pp. 493-494.
“McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution , p. 586.
“Elliot, IV, pp. 117-118.
87 Cato Letters, Ford, Essays, pp. 261-262.
“Elliot, IV, p. 214.
CECELIA M. KENYON 55I
of state recall of the former, were others. Direct, popular election
of either was not proposed.
Since most of the state executives and legislators held office
for annual or biennial terms, one would naturally expect the
substantially longer tenure of the President and Senate to be
severely criticized. There were numerous objections to the six-
year term of Senators, some to the four-year term of the President,
and a few to the two-year term of members of the House of
Representatives. It is to be noted, however, that there was no
serious attempt to shorten the length of term of any of these
officers, nor was there any attempt to make the tenure of either
the President or the Senate correspond with that of the House.
It was agreed that the two houses should “afford a mutual check”
on each other, 89 and that the “stability” provided by the Senate
“was essential to good government.” 90
The most insistent and repeated criticism was the failure of
the Constitution to provide for the compulsory rotation of office
for Senators and the President. “Nothing is so essential to the
preservation of a republican government as a periodical rotation,”
said George Mason, 91 and Melancton Smith pronounced it “a very
important and truly republican institution.” 92 They greatly feared
that President and Senators would be perpetually re-elected, and
in effect hold office for life. Mason, for example, was quite con¬
tent for the Senate to serve six years, and the President even
eight, but he believed that without rotation, the new government
would become “an elective monarchy.” 93 The President would be
able to perpetuate himself forever, it was assumed, because his
election would always be thrown into the House of Representa¬
tives. In that body, corruption, intrigue, foreign influence, and
above all else, the incumbent’s use of his patronage, would make
it possible for every man, once elected, to hold office for life.
Senators would “hold their office perpetually,” 94 by corrupting
their electors, the state legislatures. In New York, where the
subject was debated very thoroughly, the Anti-Federalists were
challenged to show how such corruption could take place, and
continue for life, among a group which was continuously subject
to popular election, and which would presumably not be perma-
89 EIliot, n, p. 308 (Lansing).
*°Ibid ., p. 309 (Smith).
"Elliot, in, p. 485.
82 EUiot, II, p. 310.
"Elliot, ni, p. 485.
"Elliot, n, p. 309 (Smith).
552 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
nent. To this challenge Lansing replied, 'It is unnecessary to
particularize the numerous ways in which public bodies are
accessible to corruption. The poison always finds a channel, and
never wants an object/’ 95 No distinction as to comparative cor¬
ruptibility was made between national and state representatives.
To Federalist objections that compulsory rotation constituted
an abridgment of the people’s right to elect whomsoever they
wished, Melancton Smith replied impatiently, "What is govern¬
ment itself but a restraint upon the natural rights of the people?
What constitution was ever devised that did not operate as a
restraint on their natural liberties?” 96 Lansing conceded that rota¬
tion placed a restriction on the people’s free choice of rulers, but
he thought this beneficial: "The rights of the people will be best
supported by checking, at a certain point, the current of popular
favor, and preventing the establishment of an influence which
may leave to elections little more than the form of freedom.” 97
The power of recall by state legislatures was associated with
compulsory rotation as a means of preventing senatorial abuse
of power. Not only would it enforce strict responsibility of sen¬
ators to their electors, but in so doing it would protect the interests
and preserve the sovereignty of the separate states. For these
reasons, its adoption was strongly pressed in several of the rati¬
fying conventions. Beyond these reasons, which were primary,
recall combined with rotation would have a secondary beneficent
result. It would serve to prevent the perpetuation of intra-legisla¬
tive parties and factions—something which the Anti-Federalists
feared quite as much as their opponents. Even if the power of
recall should not actually be used, said Lansing, it would "destroy
party spirit.” 98 When his opponents turned this argument against
him, and suggested that factions within the state legislatures
might use the power to remove good, honorable, and faithful men
from the Senate, the answer was that the legislatures had not
abused the power under the Articles of Confederation and would
almost certainly not do so in the future, and that even if they
did, ample opportunity would be provided for the displaced sena¬
tor to defend himself. The influence of "ambitious and designing
men” would be detected and exposed, and the error easily cor¬
rected. 99 A curious "Trust them, trust them not” attitude toward
95 Elliot, II, p. 295.
"Ibid., p. 311.
97 Ibid., p. 295. It was in this debate that Lansing made the Madisonian
statement quoted above.
9 S Elliot, II, p. 290.
™Ibid., p. 299.
CECELIA M. KENYON 553
the state legislatures is thus revealed. They could not be trusted
to refuse re-election to unfaithful or ambitious senators, though
they could be trusted to remove the same and to leave in office
all those who deserved well of them and of their constituents.
From this it is clear that the Anti-Federalists were not willing
to trust either upper or lower house of the proposed national
Congress; neither were they willing to trust their own state legis¬
latures completely, though they had less fear of the latter because
these could be kept under closer observation.
The same attitude is indicated by Anti-Federalist reaction to the
restrictions placed on state legislatures by Article I, Section 10
of the Constitution, and to the then potential review of both state
and national legislation by the Supreme Court.
Of the latter prospect, frequently said to have been one of the
great bulwarks erected against the democratic majority, very little
was said during the ratification debate. There was no explicit
provision for judicial review in the Constitution, and it is probably
not possible to prove conclusively whether or not its authors in¬
tended the Supreme Court to exercise this power. The evidence
suggests that they probably assumed it would. Hamilton’s Fed¬
eralist 78 supports this view. The issue was never debated in the
state conventions, and there are almost no references to it in
any of the Anti-Federalist arguments. Since Federalist 78 was
published before the Virginia, New York, and North Carolina
Conventions met, this lack of discussion is significant and would
seem to reflect lack of concern. There was severe criticism of
Article III, particularly in Virginia, but it centered around the
jurisdiction of the lower federal courts to be established by
Congress, not around the Supreme Court. The issue was entirely
one of state courts versus federal courts, not of courts versus
legislatures.
The single direct reference to judicial review made in the
Virginia Convention—at least the only one I have found—sug¬
gests that this institution was, or would have been, thoroughly
congenial to the Anti-Federalists. The statement was made by
Patrick Henry:
Yes, sir, our judges opposed the acts of the legislature. We have this
landmark to guide us. They had fortitude to declare that they were
the judiciary, and would oppose unconstitutional acts. Are you sure
that your federal judiciary will act thus? Is that judiciary as well
constructed, and as independent of the other branches, as our state
judiciary? Where are your landmarks in this government? I will be
bold to say you cannot find any in it. I take it as the highest encomium
554 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
on this country, that the acts of the legislature, if unconstitutional,
are liable to be opposed by the judiciary. 100
There was nothing equivocal about Henry's attitude. It elicited
no comment. Possibly neither side wished to commit itself; more
likely the statement was lost and forgotten after brighter flames
had issued from the great orator's fire. What is really significant,
however, is the complete absence of debate over judicial review.
The Anti-Federalists probed the Constitution for every conceivable
threat, explicit or implicit, to their conception of free and popular
government. If they had considered judicial review such a threat,
they would surely have made the most of it, and particularly
after Federalist 78 was published.
There was also comparatively little attention given to the re¬
strictions which Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution placed
on the state legislatures. Among other things, the states were
forbidden to coin money, emit bills of credit, make anything but
gold or silver legal tender for the payment of debts, or pass any
law impairing the obligations of contracts. These are the pro¬
visions which recent historians have emphasized as designed to
protect the property of the conservative class against the on¬
slaughts of the radical democratic majority. The Anti-Federalists
had very little to say about these provisions. The notation of the
New York Convention's action is significant: ‘The committee
then proceded through sections 8, 9, and 10, of this article [I],
and the whole of the next, with little or no debate.” 101 In Virginia
and the Carolinas there was more discussion, but nothing like a
full-dress debate, and very little indication of any strong or wide¬
spread opposition. In fact, Patrick Henry said that the restrictions
were “founded in good principles,” 102 and William Grayson said
of the prohibition against paper money, “it is unanimously wished
by every one that it should not be objected to.” 103 Richard Henry
Lee expressed his preference for paper money to be issued by
Congress only. 104 Of the few objections or doubts expressed, these
were typical. Henry in Virginia and Galloway in North Carolina
both expressed a fear that the contract clause might be interpreted
to force the states to redeem their respective shares of the depreci¬
ated Continental currency and of state securities at face value. 105
100 Elliot, HI, p. 325.
101 Elliot, II, p. 406.
102 Elliot, in, p. 471.
im Ibid., p. 566.
104 J. C. Ballagh, editor. The Letters of Richard Henry Lee , 2 vols. (New
York, 1911-1914), pp. 421-422.
105 Elliot, in, pp. 318-319; IV, p. 190.
CECELIA M. KENYON 555
Henry was also angry because of the necessary implication that
the states were too “depraved” to be trusted with the contracts of
their own citizens. 106 With regard to the prohibition of paper
money, two men in North Carolina defended the previous state
issue as having been a necessary expedient in troublesome times,
but did not seem to object to the prohibition of future issues. 107
One man argued against this clause and the supreme law clause
on the ground that the effect might be to destroy the paper money
already in circulation and thereby create great confusion. 108 His
contention was denied. 109 These remarks, none of which expressed
direct opposition, were typical. In South Carolina, however,
Rawlins Lowndes came out flatly against this restriction, defended
the previous issue of paper money and the right of the state to
make further issues in the future. 110 His position appears to have
been the exception, at least of those which were expressed openly
and publicly on the various convention floors. 111
The response of the Anti-Federalists to these important limita¬
tions on the power of the states can accurately be described, I
think, as one of over-all approbation tempered by some doubts
caused by fear that they would be applied retroactively. This
attitude is in rather curious contrast with the extremely jealous
reaction to other changes in federal-state relations for which the
Constitution provided. There were violent objections to federal
control over state militia, to Congressional power to tax and to
regulate commerce, to the creation of an inferior system of
federal courts. All these things brought forth loud cries that the
106 Elliot, in, p. 156.
™Ibid., IV, pp. 88, 169-170.
10S Ibid„ pp. 180, 184-185.
100 Ibid., pp. 181-185.
no Ibid., pp. 289-290.
m There appears to have been more opposition to the provisions of Article
I, Section 10 expressed outside of the Convention than inside. See Trenholme,
Ratification in North Carolina, p. 42, and Clarence E. Miner, The Ratifica¬
tion of the Federal Constitution in New York, Studies in History, Economics
and Public Law, Vol. XCIV, No. 3, Whole No. 214, Columbia University
(New York, 1921), for the extra-Convention debate in New York. It may
be that this was one of the subjects the Anti-Federalists preferred not to
debate for the official record. See Trenholme, pp. 166-167, for a discussion
of the refusal of North Carolina Anti-Federalists to state in the Convention
objections to the Constitution being made outside. There was also appar¬
ently a similar situation during the Virginia Convention, where the Federal¬
ists objected to what was happening “outdoors/’ See Elliot, III, p. 237. See
also the remarks of Alexander C. Hanson, a member of the Maryland Con¬
vention. In discussing these provisions, of which he strongly approved, he
wrote, “I have here perhaps touched a string, which secretly draws together
many of the foes to the plan/’ In Aristides, “Remarks on the Proposed Plan
of a Federal Government,” Ford, Pamphlets, p. 243.
556 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
states would be swallowed up by the national government. These
important restrictions on the economic powers of the states were
received with relative silence. There was apparently very little
objection to these limitations on the power of state legislative
majorities.
It remains to consider the extent to which the general Anti-
Federalist distrust of their representatives, particularly those who
were to serve in the national government but also those who
served m their state legislatures, reflected also a distrust of the
majorities who elected them, that is to say, of the people them¬
selves. The answer is partly wrapped up in the whole complex
of ideas constituting the Anti-Federalist conception of republican
government, which I shall attempt to draw together in the con¬
cluding section of this essay. Some parts of the answer can be put
into the record here.
The attitude of the Anti-F eder alists toward the people as dis¬
tinguished from their representatives, and toward the general
problem of majority rule, was not radically different from that of
their opponents. It is a curious and remarkable fact that during
the course of this great debate in which the most popular national
constitution ever framed was submitted to the public for the most
popular mode of ratification yet attempted, there was very little
tendency on either side to enthrone “the people” or to defer auto¬
matically to their judgment. Neither side showed the slightest in-
c mation to use as its slogan, “Vox populi vox Dei.” Rather was
t e contrary true, and some of the Anti-Federalist expressions of
this attitude could easily have fitted into the dark picture of
human nature presented in The Federalist. Indeed, the speeches
and essays of the Anti-Federalists were peculiarly lacking in the
great expressions of faith in the people which are to be found in
^^ngs of Jefferson, and even occasionally in The Federalist
itself. This is partly to be accounted for because their position was
a negative one; they attacked the proposed system on the ground
that it would be destructive of liberty.
It was therefore perhaps natural that they sometimes expressed
fear about what may be called the constituent capacity of the
peop e—the capacity of the people to act wisely in the actual
choice of a constitution. They were afraid that the people might
not see m the proposed new government all of the dangers and
defects which they themselves saw. And there were gloomy com¬
ments about lack of stability. Said George Clinton in the New
ork Convention, “The people, when wearied with their distresses,
will m the moment of frenzy, be guilty of the most imprudent and
CECELIA M. KENYON 557
desperate measures. ... I know the people are too apt to vibrate
from one extreme to another. The effects of this disposition are
what I wish to guard against.” 112 His colleague, Melancton Smith,
spoke in a similar vein:
Fickleness and inconstancy, he said, were characteristics of a free
people; and, in framing a constitution for them, it was, perhaps, the
most difficult thing to correct this spirit, and guard against the evil
effects of it. He was persuaded it could not be altogether prevented
without destroying their freedom. . . . This fickle and inconstant spirit
was the more dangerous in bringing about changes in the govern¬
ment. 113
It was “Centinel,” author or son of the author of Pennsylvania’s
revolutionary Constitution, who expressed the gravest doubts
about the capacity of the people to make a wise choice in the form
of government, and who expounded a kind of Burkeian conserva¬
tism as the best guarantor of the people’s liberties. In a passage
apparently aimed at the prestige given to the proposed Constitu¬
tion by the support of men like Washington and Franklin, “Cen-
tinel” wrote that “the science of government is so abstruse, that
few are able to judge for themselves.” Without the assistance of
those “who are competent to the task of developing the principles
of government,” the people were “too apt to yield an implicit as¬
sent to the opinions of those characters whose abilities are held in
the highest esteem, and to those in whose integrity and patriotism
they can confide. ...” This was dangerous, because such men
might easily be dupes, “the instruments of despotism in the hands
of the artful and designing.” “Centinel” then continued:
If it were not for the stability and attachment which time and habit
gives to forms of government, it would be in the power of the enlight¬
ened and aspiring few, if they should combine, at any time to destroy
the best establishments, and even make the people the instruments of
their own subjugation.
The late revolution having effaced in a great measure all former
habits, and the present institutions are so recent, that there exists not
that great reluctance to innovation, so remarkable in old communities,
and which accords with reason, for the most comprehensive mind
cannot foresee the full operation of material changes on civil polity;
it is the genius of the common law to resist innovation. 114
Later in the same series of articles, “Centinel” pronounced “this
reluctance to change” as “the greatest security of free govern-
I12 Elliot, II, p. 359.
U3 Elliot, II, p. 225.
114 McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Constitution , pp. 566-567.
558 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ments, and the principal bulwark of liberty.” 115 This attitude pro¬
vides an interesting comparison with the unquestioning assump¬
tion in the Federal Convention that the proposed Constitution
would be submitted to the people for their verdict, and with the
level of popular understanding of political affairs to which the
essays of the Federalist Papers were addressed.
Serious reservations about the capacity of the people as electors
were implicit in several of the arguments noted above. The advo¬
cacy of religious qualifications for office-holding indicated a desire
to restrict the choice of the electorate to certified Protestants, and
the demand for compulsory rotation of senators and President
rested on the fear that corruption of both state and national legis¬
latures by the incumbents of those offices could not be prevented
by the feeble check of popular election. Perhaps most important
was the belief that the people, voting in the large constituencies
provided for by the Constitution, would either lose elections to
their presumed aristocratic opponents because of the latter’s su¬
perior capacity for organization, or would themselves let then-
choice fall on such aristocrats, or be deceived by ambitious and
unscrupulous demagogues.
There was no more confidence in the inherent justice of the will
of the majority than there was in its electoral capacity. Since the
Anti-Federalists were skeptical that constituent opinion would be
adequately reflected in the national legislature, they were less in¬
clined than the Federalists to regard the government as the instru¬
ment of the people or of the majority. When they did so, there
was not the slightest tendency to consider its decisions "right”
because they were majority decisions. Rather was there always
some standard of right and justice, independent of the majority’s
will, to which that will ought to conform. The Anti-Federalists
were perfectly consistent in their conception of political behavior
and did not regard a majority as superior to the sum of its parts,
that is to say, of individual men motivated by self-interest and
subject to a natural lust for power. There was very little discussion
of majority rule and minority rights as fundamental principles of
representative government, but the general attitude of the Anti-
Federalists is, I think, reasonably clear.
They assumed, of course, that in a republican form of govern-
115 Ibid ., p. 655. It may be noted that this Burkeian friend of Tom Paine
had not undertaken to submit the radical revolutionary Constitution of
Pennsylvania to the people of that state for full, free, and deliberate debate,
but had rushed its ratification through the legislature with most unseemly
haste.
CECELIA M. KENYON 559
ment, the majority must rule. But they also assumed that the will
of the majority ought to be limited, especially when the “majority”
was a legislative one. They demanded a bill of rights, with special
emphasis on procedural protections in criminal cases, and vehe¬
mently repudiated the somewhat spurious Federalist argument
that a bill of rights was not necessary in a government ruled by
the people themselves. To this, James Winthrop replied:
. . . that the sober and industrious part of the community should be
defended from the rapacity and violence of the vicious and idle. A
bill of rights, therefore, ought to set forth the purposes for which the
compact is made, and serves to secure the minority against the usur¬
pation of the majority. . . . The experience of all mankind has proved
the prevalence of a disposition to use power wantonly. It is therefore
as necessary to defend an individual against the majority in a repub-
lick as against the king in a monarchy . 116
The reaction of the Anti-Federalists to the restrictions imposed
on state legislative majorities by Article I, Section 10 of the Con¬
stitution is also relevant at this point. These provisions were cer¬
tainly intended to protect the rights of property against legislative
invasion by majorities. If there had been any spirit of doctrinaire
majoritarianism among the opponents of the Constitution, this
would surely have been the occasion to express it, and in quite
unequivocal terms. There was very little open criticism of these
provisions, none on the grounds that they violated the principle
of majority rule or that they were designed to protect the interests
of the upper classes. 117 What criticism there was, was expressed
largely in terms of practical considerations.
Distrust of majority factions in much the same sense as Madi¬
son's was emphatically expressed by the one sector of Anti-Fed¬
eralism which constituted the most self-conscious minority. South¬
erners felt keenly the conflict of interest between North and South
and were vehemently opposed to surrendering themselves to the
majority of the seven Eastern states. One of the reasons for George
Mason's refusal to sign the Constitution had been his failure to
get adopted a two-thirds majority vote for all laws affecting com¬
merce and navigation. His fears for the South's interests were
shared by his fellow Southerners and were frequently expressed in
the Convention debates. “It will be a government of a faction,” said
116 Agrippa Letters, Ford, Essays, p. 117. See also Elliot, III, p. 499, for a
similar statement from William Grayson.
I17 See above, footnote 111, for discussion of the possibility of more criti¬
cism expressed outside of the conventions.
560 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
William Grayson, “and this observation will apply to every part of
it; for, having a majority, they may do what they please.” 118 Other
colleagues in Virginia joined in this distrust of the anticipated
Northern majority uniting to oppress the South. 119 In North and
South Carolina it was much the same. Bloodworth lamented, “To
the north of the Susquehanna there are thirty-six representatives,
and to the south of it only twenty-nine. They will always outvote
us.” 120 In South Carolina, Rawlins Lowndes predicted that “when
this new Constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern
States would set, never to rise again.” Why? Because the Eastern
states would have a majority in the legislature and would not hesi¬
tate to use it—probably to interfere with the slave trade, “because
they have none themselves, and therefore want to exclude us from
this great advantage.” 121
There was, then, no doctrinaire devotion to majoritarianism. It
was assumed that oppression of individuals or of groups might
come from majorities of the people themselves as well as from
kings or aristocrats.
VI
For a generation the Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
has exerted a deep and extensive influence over students of Amer¬
ican history and government. The conception of the Constitution
as the product of a conservative reaction against the ideals of the
Revolution has been widely accepted, and Beard's analysis of the
document itself commonly followed. According to this interpreta¬
tion, the Founding Fathers secured their property rights by placing
certain restrictions on state legislatures and by setting up a gov¬
ernment in which the system of separation of powers, with checks
and balances, indirect elections, staggered terms of office, and a
national judiciary with the potential power of judicial review,
would restrain the force of turbulent, democratic majorities. Sur¬
prisingly litde attention has been devoted to the Anti-Federalists,
but it is implied that they were the true heirs of the Revolutionary
tradition—equally devoted to individual liberty and majority rule.
The Federalists’ desire for strong central government and the Anti-
Federalists’ fear of such are also considered, but the allegedly
undemocratic structure of the national government itself is
118 Elliot, III, p. 492.
pp. 152, 221-222.
1 “Elliot, IV, p. 185.
m lbid., p. 272.
CECELIA M. KENYON 561
strongly emphasized. This aspect of the Beard thesis is open to
question.
For the objections of the Anti-Federalists were not directed to¬
ward the barriers imposed on simple majority rule by the Consti¬
tution. Advocates and opponents of ratification may have belonged
to different economic classes and been motivated by different eco¬
nomic interests. But they shared a large body of political ideas
and attitudes, together with a common heritage of political insti¬
tutions. For one thing, they shared a profound distrust of man’s
capacity to use power wisely and well. They believed self-interest
to be the dominant motive of political behavior, no matter whether
the form of government be republican or monarchical, and they
believed in the necessity of constructing political machinery that
would restrict the operation of self-interest and prevent men en¬
trusted with political power from abusing it. This was the funda¬
mental assumption of the men who wrote the Constitution, and of
those who opposed its adoption, as well.
The fundamental issue over which Federalists and Anti-Fed¬
eralists split was the question whether republican government
could be extended to embrace a nation, or whether it must be
limited to the comparatively small political and geographical units
which the separate American states then constituted. The Anti-
Federalists took the latter view; and in a sense they were the con¬
servatives of 1787, and their opponents the radicals.
The Anti-Federalists were clinging to a theory of representative
government that was already becoming obsolete, and would have
soon become so even had they been successful in preventing the
establishment of a national government. Certainly it was a theory
which could never have provided the working principles for such
a government. For the Anti-F ederalists were not only localists, but
localists in a way strongly reminiscent of the city-state theory of
Rousseau’s Social Contract. According to that theory, a society
capable of being governed in accordance with the General Will
had to be limited in size, population, and diversity. The Anti-Fed¬
eralists had no concept of a General Will comparable to Rous¬
seau’s, and they accepted the institution of representation, where
he had rejected it. But many of their basic attitudes were similar
to his. Like him, they thought republican government subject to
limitations of size, population, and diversity; and like him also,
they thought the will of the people would very likely be distorted
by the process of representation. In fact, their theory of represen¬
tation and their belief that republican government could not be
extended nation-wide were integrally related.
562 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
They regarded representation primarily as an institutional sub¬
stitute for direct democracy and endeavored to restrict its opera¬
tion to the performance of that function; hence their plea that the
legislature should be an exact miniature of the people, containing
spokesmen for all classes, all groups, all interests, all opinions, in
the community; hence, too, their preference for short legislative
terms of office and their inclination, especially in the sphere of
state government, to regard representatives as delegates bound
by the instructions of constituents rather than as men expected
and trusted to exercise independent judgment. This was a natural
stage in the development of representative government, but it con¬
tained several weaknesses and was, I think, already obsolete in
late eighteenth-century America.
Its major weaknesses were closely akin to those of direct democ¬
racy itself, for representation of this kind makes difficult the proc¬
ess of genuine deliberation, as well as the reconciliation of diverse
interests and opinions. Indeed, it is notable, and I think not acci¬
dental, that the body of Anti-Federalist thought as a whole showed
little consideration of the necessity for compromise. The Founding
Fathers were not democrats, but in their recognition of the role
which compromise must play in the process of popular govem-
tfrCHt, they were far more advanced than their opponents.
It is clear, too, that the same factors limiting the size and ex¬
tent of direct democracies would also be operative in republics
where representation is regarded only as a substitute for political
participation by the whole people. Within their own frame of
reference, the Anti-Federalists were quite right in insisting that
republican government would work only in relatively small states,
where the population was also small and relatively homogeneous.
If there is great diversity among the people, with many interests
and many opinions, then all cannot be represented without making
the legislature as large and unwieldy as the citizen assemblies of
ancient Athens. And if the system does not lend itself readily to
compromise and conciliation, then the basis for a working con¬
sensus must be considerable homogeneity in the people them¬
selves. In the opinion of the Anti-Federalists, the American people
lacked that homogeneity. 122 This Rousseauistic vision of a small.
JlL d ° “I*" 1 . to su §§ est that Anti-Federalist attitude concerning
and ykf* modern social scientists refer to as consensus was
oF° f necessar y for the successful operation
of democracy, and the concept itself is an extremely valuable one. I would
contend that the Federalist estimate of the degree required was both
‘“jd m ° re realis , tic - 011 the subject of the extent to which the
American people were united in tradition, institutions, and ideas in 1787-
1788, see Ranney, Bases of American Federalism.”
CECELIA M. KENYON 563
simple, and homogeneous democracy may have been a fine ideal,
but it was an ideal even then. It was not to be found even in the
small states, and none of the Anti-Federalists produced a satis¬
factory answer to Madison's analysis of the weaknesses inherent
in republicanism operating on the small scale preferred by his
opponents.
Associated with this theory of representation and its necessary
limitation to small-scale republics was the Anti-F eder alis ts' pro¬
found distrust of the electoral and representative processes pro¬
vided for and implied in the proposed Constitution. Their ideal of
the legislature as an “exact miniature" of the people envisaged
something not unlike the result hoped for by modem proponents
of proportional representation. This was impossible to achieve in
the national Congress. 123 There would not and could not be enough
seats to go around. The constituencies were to be large—the ratio
of representatives to population was not to exceed one per thirty
thousand—and each representative must therefore represent not
one, but many groups among his electors. And whereas Madison
saw in this process of “filtering" or consolidating public opinion a
virtue, the Anti-Federalists saw in it only danger. They did not
think that a Congress thus elected could truly represent the will
of the people, and they particularly feared that they themselves,
the “middling class," to use Melancton Smith’s term, would be
left out.
They feared this because they saw clearly that enlarged con¬
stituencies would require more pre-election political organization
than they believed to be either wise or safe. Much has been written
recendy about the Founding Fathers’ hostility to political parties.
It is said that they designed the Constitution, especially separation
of powers, in order to counteract the effectiveness of parties. 124
This is pardy true, but I think it worth noting that the contem¬
porary opponents of the Constitution feared parties or factions in
the Madisonian sense just as much as, and that they feared parties
in the modem sense even more than, did Madison himself. They
feared and distrusted concerted group action for the purpose of
“centering votes" in order to obtain a plurality, because they be¬
lieved this would distort the automatic or natural expression of
the people’s will. The necessity of such action in large electoral
districts would work to the advantage of the upper classes, who,
because of their superior capacity and opportunity for organiza-
1S3 Nor for that matter, has it been the pattern of representation in state
legislatures.
124 See, e.g., E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York, 1942),
pp. 4 ff.
564 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
tion of this kind, would elect a disproportionate share of repre¬
sentatives to the Congress. In other words, the Anti-Federalists
were acutely aware of the role that organization played in the
winning of elections, and they were not willing to accept the
“organized” for the “real” majority. Instead they wanted to retain
the existing system, where the electoral constituencies were small,
and where organization of this kind was relatively unnecessary.
Only then could a man vote as he saw fit, confident that the result
of the election would reflect the real will of the people as exactly
as possible.
Distrust of the electoral process thus combined with the localist
feelings of the Anti-Federalists to produce an attitude of profound
fear and suspicion toward Congress. That body, it was felt, would
be composed of aristocrats and of men elected from far-away
places by the unknown peoples of distant states. It would meet
at a yet undesignated site hundreds of miles from the homes of
most of its constituents, outside the jurisdiction of any particular
state, and protected by an army of its own making. When one sees
Congress in this light, it is not surprising that the Anti-Federalists
were afraid, or that they had little faith in elections as a means
of securing responsibility and preventing Congressional tyranny. 125
Their demand for more limitations on Congressional power was
perfectly natural. These were believed to be necessary in any gov¬
ernment because of the lust for power and the selfishness in its
use which were inherent in the nature of man. They were doubly
necessary in a government on a national scale. And so the Anti-
Federalists criticized the latitude of power given to Congress under
Article I and called for more detailed provisions to limit the scope
of Congressional discretion. We are certainly indebted to them for
the movement that led to the adoption of the Bill of Rights, though
they were more concerned with the traditional common-law rights
of procedure in criminal cases than with the provisions of the
First Amendment. They were at the same time forerunners of the
unfortunate trend in the nineteenth century toward lengthy and
cumbersome constitutions filled with minute restrictions upon the
various agencies of government, especially the legislative branch.
The generality and brevity which made the national Constitution
I2 Tt is worth noting again that the abuses of power dwelt upon by the
Anti-Federalists were usually extreme ones, almost amounting to a complete
subversion of republican government. They did not regard as of any value
the Federalists’ argument that a desire to be re-elected would serve to keep
the representatives in line. The Federalists had no clear idea of politics as
a profession, but they were close to such a notion.
CECELIA M. KENYON 565
a model of draftsmanship and a viable fundamental law inspired
in the Anti-Federalists only fear.
They repeatedly attacked the Constitution for its alleged de¬
parture from Montesquieu's doctrine of separation of powers, em¬
phasized the inadequacy of the checks and balances provided
within the governmental structure, and lamented the excessive
optimism regarding the character and behavior of elective repre¬
sentatives thus revealed in the work of the Founding Fathers. It is
significant, in view of the interpretation long and generally ac¬
cepted by historians, that no one expressed the belief that the
system of separation of powers and checks and balances had been
designed to protect the property rights of the well-to-do. Their posi¬
tive proposals for remedying the defects in the system were not
numerous. They objected to the Senate's share in the appointive
and treaty-making powers and called for a separate executive
council to advise the President in the performance of these func¬
tions. Shorter terms were advocated for President and Congress,
though not as frequently or as strongly as required rotation for
senators and President. No one suggested judicial review of Con¬
gressional legislation, though Patrick Henry attacked the Constitu¬
tion because it did not explicitly provide for this safeguard to
popular government.
Had the Constitution been altered to satisfy the major structural
changes desired by the Anti-Federalists, the House of Representa¬
tives would have been considerably larger; there would have been
four rather than three branches of the government; the President
would have been limited, as he is now, to two terms in office; the
senators would have been similarly limited and also subject to
recall by their state governments. These changes might have been
beneficial. It is doubtful that they would have pleased the late
Charles Beard and his followers; it is even more doubtful that they
would have facilitated the operation of unrestrained majority rule.
Certainly that was not the intention of their proponents.
The Anti-Federalists were not latter-day democrats. Least of all
were they majoritarians with respect to the national government.
They were not confident that the people would always make wise
and correct choices in either their constituent or electoral capacity,
and many of them feared the oppression of one section in the com¬
munity by a majority reflecting the interests of another. Above all,
they consistently refused to accept legislative majorities as expres¬
sive either of justice or of the people’s will. In short, they dis¬
trusted majority rule, at its source and through the only possible
means of expression in governmental action over a large and
566 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
populous nation, that is to say, through representation. The last
thing in the world they wanted was a national democracy which
would permit Congressional majorities to operate freely and with¬
out restraint. Proponents of this kind of majority rule have almost
without exception been advocates of strong, positive action by the
national government. The Anti-Federalists were not. Their philoso¬
phy was primarily one of limitations on power, and if they had
had their way, the Constitution would have contained more checks
and balances, not fewer. Indeed it seems safe to say that the Con¬
stitution could not have been ratified at all had it conformed to
the standards of democracy which are implicit in the interpreta¬
tion of Beard and his followers. A national government without
separation of powers and checks and balances was not politically
feasible. In this respect, then, I would suggest that his interpreta¬
tion of the Constitution was unrealistic and unhistorical.
The Anti-Federalists may have followed democratic principles
within the sphere of state government and possibly provided the
impetus for the extension of power and privilege among the mass
of the people, though it is significant that they did not advocate a
broadening of the suffrage in 1787—1788 or the direct election of
the Senate or the President. But they lacked both the faith and
the vision to extend their principles nation-wide. It was the Fed¬
eralists of 1787-1788 who created a national framework which
would accommodate the later rise of democracy.
ACHIEVEMENTS
AND
PERSPECTIVES
The philosophical thrust of the Revolution, its meaning
to the men who led it and to the modem world, the
nature of its objectives, and some of the ways in which
it may be regarded as a success are discussed in the fol¬
lowing selections. The first selection shows how the Revo¬
lution presented American leaders with a formidable in¬
tellectual challenge and describes three notable principles
—in the view of the author, the three most important
intellectual achievements of the Revolution—that the
men of the Revolution developed to meet that challenge.
The second analyzes the impulses and assumptions
behind the Revolution and the fetish of constitution¬
making which accompanied it. By comparisons with
similar phenomena in the French Revolution and the
later revolutionary tradition, the author suggests how
these and other factors unique to the American experi¬
ence helped to make the American Revolution a success.
hannah arendt (b. 1906), a political philosopher and
social critic, is a member of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton.
The American Revolution Considered
As an Intellectual Movement
EDMUND S. MORGAN
In 1740 America’s leading intellectuals were clergymen and
thought about theology; in 1790 they were statesmen and thought
about politics. A variety of forces, some of them reaching deep
Reprinted with permission from Morton White and Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., eds., Paths of American Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 11,
22-33.
568
EDMUND S. MORGAN 569
into the colonial past, helped to bring about the transformation,
but it was so closely associated with the revolt from England that
one may properly consider the American Revolution, as an intel¬
lectual movement, to mean the substitution of political for clerical
leadership and of politics for religion as the most challenging area
of human thought and endeavor.
« « •
Although the clergy were a powerful influence in molding
American political opinion during the Revolutionary period, they
did not recover through politics the intellectual leadership they
had already begun to lose. Their own principles barred them from
an active role in politics. While they had always given political
advice freely and exercised their influence in elections, most of
them would have considered it wrong to sit in a representative
assembly, on a governor’s council, or on the bench. To them as to
their Puritan ancestors the clerical exercise of temporal powers
spelled Rome. A minister’s business was, after all, the saving of
souls. By the same token, however outraged he might be by the
actions of the English government, however excited by the
achievement of American independence, a minister could not de¬
vote his principal intellectual effort to the expounding of political
ideas and political principles. As the quarrel with England de¬
veloped and turned into a struggle for independence and nation¬
hood, though the ministers continued to speak up on the American
side, other voices commanding greater attention were raised by
men who were free to make a career of politics and prepared to
act as well as talk.
There had always, of course, been political leaders in the col¬
onies, but hitherto politics had been a local affair, requiring at
most the kind of talents needed for collecting votes or pulling
wires. A colonial legislative assembly might occasionally engage
in debates about paper money, defense, or modes of taxation; but
the issues did not reach beyond the borders of the colony involved
and were seldom of a kind to challenge a superior mind. No Amer¬
ican debated imperial policy in the British Parliament, the Privy
Council, or the Board of Trade. The highest political post to which
a man could aspire in the colonies was that of governor, and
everywhere except in Connecticut and Rhode Island, this was ob¬
tained not through political success but through having friends in
England. Few native Americans ever achieved it or even tried to.
But the advent of Parliamentary taxation inaugurated a quarter-
century of political discussion in America that has never since
been matched in intensity. With the passage of the Stamp Act in
570 BE INTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1765, every colonial legislature took up the task of defining the
structure of the British empire; and as colonial definitions met
with resistance from England, as the colonies banded together for
defense and declared their independence, politics posed continen¬
tal, even global, problems that called forth the best efforts of the
best American minds. In no other period of our history would it
be possible to find in politics five men of such intellectual stature
as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James
Madison, and Thomas Jefferson; and there were others only
slightly less distinguished.
Whether they hailed from Pennsylvania or Virginia, New
England or New York, the men who steered Americans through
the Revolution, the establishment of a new nation, and the
framing of the Constitution did not for the most part repudiate
the political ideas inherited from the period of clerical dominance.
Like the clergy, they started from a conviction of human de¬
pravity; like the clergy, they saw government originating in com¬
pact, and measured governmental performance against an abso¬
lute standard ordained by God. Like the clergy too, they found
inspiration in the example of seventeenth-century Englishmen.
Sometimes they signed their own attacks on George III or his
ministers with the names of John Hampden, William Pym, or
other Parliamentary heroes in the struggle against Charles I.
They read the works of Harrington and of Harrington’s later
admirers; and after the Declaration of Independence, when they
found themselves in a position similar to that of England in the
1650’s, they drew heavily on the arsenal of political ideas fur¬
nished by these latter-day republicans.
Indeed, most of the ideas about government which American
intellectuals employed first in their resistance to Parliament, and
then in constructing their own governments, had been articulated
earlier in England and were still in limited circulation there. The
social compact, fundamental law, the separation of powers,
human equality, religious freedom, and the superiority of repub-
lican government were continuing ideals for a small but ardent
group of Englishmen who, like the Americans, believed that the
British constitution was basically republican and drew inspiration
from it while attacking the ministers and monarch who seemed
to be betraying it. 1 It is perhaps no accident that the work in
which Americans first repudiated monarchy, Common Sense , was
"See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cam¬
bridge, Mass., 1959).
EDMUND S. MORGAN 57 I
written by an Englishman, Thomas Paine, who had come to
America only two years before.
But if Englishmen supplied the intellectual foundations both
for the overthrow of English rule and for the construction of
republican government, Americans put the ideas into practice and
drew on American experience and tradition to devise refinements
and applications of the greatest importance. That republican
ideas, which existed in a state of obscurity in England, should
be congenial in the colonies, was due in the first place to the strong
continuing Calvinist tradition which had been nourished over the
years by the American clergy. But fully as important was the
fact that during a hundred and fifty years of living in the free¬
dom of a relatively isolated and empty continent, the colonists
had developed a way of life in which republican ideas played a
visible part. When Parliamentary taxation set Americans to an¬
alyzing their relationship to the mother country, they could not
escape seeing that the social, economic, and political configura¬
tion of America had diverged from that of England in ways that
made Americans better off than Englishmen. And the things that
made them better off could be labeled republican.
England’s practical experience with republicanism had lasted
only eleven years. With the return of Charles II in 1660, English¬
men repudiated their republic and the Puritans who had spon¬
sored it. Though a small minority continued to write and talk
about republicanism and responsible government, they wielded
no authority. The House of Commons grew more powerful but
less common, and the main current of English national life flowed
in the channels of monarchy, aristocracy, and special privilege.
Americans, by contrast, though formally subjects of the king,
had lived long under conditions that approximated the ideals of
the English republican theorists. Harrington thought he had
found in the England of his day the widespread ownership that
seemed to him a necessary condition for republican government;
but throughout the colonies ownership of property had always
been more widespread than in England. Furthermore no member
of the nobility had settled in America, so that people were accus¬
tomed to a greater degree of social as well as economic equality
than existed anywhere in England.
During the 1640’s and 1650’s England had seen a rapid multi¬
plication of religious sects, which produced a wide belief in
religious freedom, but after the Anglican Church had reimposed
its controls in the 1660’s, the most that other denominations
could hope for was toleration. In America, religious diversity had
572 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
steadily increased, and with it came a religious freedom which,
if still imperfect, surpassed anything England had ever known.
Though the English people had twice removed an unsatis¬
factory king, in 1649 and in 1688, the English government re¬
mained fax less responsible and far less responsive to the people
than any colonial government. While the members of Parliament
disclaimed any obligation to their immediate constituents, the
members of American representative assemblies knew that they
were expected to look after the interests of the people who
elected them. Nor were the voters in America only a small minority
of the population as in England. In most colonies probably the
great majority of adult males owned enough property to meet the
qualification (which varied from colony to colony) for voting.
In England, the government paid hundreds of office-holders whose
offices, carrying no duties, existed solely for the enrichment of
those who held them. In the colonies such sinecures were few.
Americans thought that government existed to do a job, and
they created no offices except for useful purposes.
Thus when the quarrel with Parliament began, the colonists
already had what English reformers wanted. And the colonists
were inclined to credit their good fortune not to the accident of
geography but to their own superior virtue and political sophisti¬
cation. The interpretation was not without foundation: since
Calvinist traditions were still strong among them and since they
had often learned of British republican ideas through the sermons
of Calvinist clergymen, Americans retained what the Enlighten¬
ment had dimmed in England and Europe, a keen sense of
human depravity and of the dangers it posed for government.
Although their own governments had hitherto given little evidence
of depravity, by comparison with those of Europe, they were
expert at detecting it in any degree. They had always been horri¬
fied by the open corruption of British politics and feared it would
lead to tyranny. When Parliament attempted to tax them and
sent swarms of customs collectors, sailors, and soldiers to support
the attempt, their fears were confirmed. In resisting the British
and in forming their own governments, they saw the central
problem as one of devising means to check the inevitable oper¬
ation of depravity in men who wielded power. English statesmen
had succumbed to it. How could Americans avoid their mistakes?
In the era of the American Revolution, from 1764 to 1789,
this was the great intellectual challenge. Although human de¬
pravity continued to pose as difficult theological problems as ever,
the best minds of the period addressed themselves to the rescue,
EDMUND S. MORGAN 573
not of souls, but of governments, from the perils of corruption.
Of course the problem was not new, nor any more susceptible
of final solution than it had been in an earlier time, but Ameri¬
cans in the Revolutionary period contributed three notable prin¬
ciples to men's efforts to deal with it.
The first principle, which evolved from the struggle with Parlia¬
ment, was that the people of one region ought not to exercise
dominion over those of another, even though the two may be
joined together. It was an idea that overlapped and greatly facili¬
tated the slower but parallel development of the more general
belief in human equality. In objecting to British taxation in 1764
the colonists had begun by asserting their right to equal treatment
with the king's subjects in Great Britain: Englishmen could not
be taxed except by their representatives; neither therefore could
Americans. Within a year or two the idea was extended to a
denial that Parliament, representing the electors of Great Britain,
could exercise any authority over the colonies. The empire, ac¬
cording to one American writer, was “a confederacy of states,
independent of each other, yet united under one head,” namely
the king. "I cannot find,” said another, "that the inhabitants of
the colonies are dependent on the people of Britain, or the people
of Britain on them, any more than Kent is on Sussex, or Sussex
on Kent.” 2
It took varying lengths of time for other Americans to reach
the position thus anonymously expressed in the press in 1765 and
1766. Franklin stated it later in 1766; 3 Jefferson, James Wilson,
and John Adams had all expressed it by the beginning of 1775. 4
It was frequently buttressed by the citation of precedents from
English constitutional history, but it rested on a principle capable
of universal application, the principle stated in the preamble of
the Declaration of Independence, that every people is entitled, by
the laws of nature and of nature's God, to a separate and equal
station.
Before Independence this principle offered a means of re¬
organizing the British empire so as to defeat the tyranny which
Americans thought English statesmen were developing in the
2 E. S. Morgan, Prologue to Revolution; Sources and Documents on the
Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), pp. 73, 91.
Werner Crane, Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, 1758-1775
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1950), p. xlii.
4 Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America
(Williamsburg, 1774); James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and the
Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia,
1774); John Adams, Works , C. F. Adams, ed. (Boston, 1850-1856) IV, 3-177.
574 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
extension of taxation. If a British legislature, in which the colo¬
nists were not represented, could govern them, then neither
British nor colonial freedom could be safe. Americans without a
voice in the government could not defend their rights against
corrupt rulers. Englishmen, relieved of expenses by American
taxation, might rejoice for the moment, but their rulers, no
longer dependent on them financially, would be able to govern
as they pleased and would eventually escape popular control
altogether. The only solution was to give each legislature power
only over the people who chose it.
In the 1770’s England was unwilling to listen to the colonial
arguments, but ultimately adopted the American principle in
forming the Commonwealth of Nations. The independent United
States applied the principle not only in the confederation of
states but in the annexation of other areas. When Virginia in
1781 offered the United States Congress her superior claim to
the old Northwest, it was with the stipulation that the region be
divided into separate republican states, each of which was to be
admitted to the Union on equal terms with the old ones. The
stipulation, though not accepted by Congress at the time, was
carried out in Jefferson’s land ordinance of 1784 and in the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which superseded it. The United
States never wavered from the principle until after the Spanish-
American War, when it temporarily accepted government of
areas which it had no intention of admitting to the union on
equal terms.
The second contribution of the American Revolutionists was an
application of the assumption, implicit in the whole idea of a
compact between rulers and people, that a people can exist as a
people before they have a government and that they can act as
a people independently of government. The Puritans had distin¬
guished between the compact of a group of individuals with God,
by which they became a people, and the subsequent compact
between this people and their rulers, by which government was
created. John Locke had similarly distinguished between the dis¬
solution of society and of government, and so, at least tacitly,
had the Revolutionists. They would have been more daring, not
to say foolhardy, if they had undertaken to destroy the bonds of
society as well as of government. But in their haste to form new
governments after the royal government in each colony dissolved,
the Revolutionists followed a procedure that did not clearly dis¬
tinguish the people from the government. Provincial congresses,
exercising a de facto power, drafted and adopted permanent
EDMUND S. MORGAN 575
constitutions, which in most cases then went into effect without
submission to a popular vote.
When the Massachusetts provincial congress proposed to follow
t hi s procedure in 1776, the citizens of the town of Concord
pointed out the dangerous opening which it offered to human
depravity. A due facto government that legitimized itself could also
alter itself. Whatever safeguards it adopted against corruption
could easily be discarded by later legislators: “a Constitution
alterable by the Supreme Legislative is no Security at all to the
Subject against any Encroachment of the Governing part on any
or on all of their Rights and priviliges.” The town therefore sug¬
gested that a special popularly elected convention be called for
the sole purpose of drafting a constitution, which should then be
submitted to the people for approval. 5
It is impossible to determine who was responsible for Concord's
action, but the protest displays a refinement in the application of
republican ideas that does not appear to have been expressed
before. Concord's suggestion was eventually followed in the draft¬
ing and adoption of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and
of every subsequent constitution established in the United States.
By it the subservience of government to the people was secured
through a constitution clearly superior to the government it
created, a constitution against which the people could measure
governmental performance and against which each branch of
government could measure the actions of the other branches. The
separation of governmental powers into a bicameral legislature,
an executive, and a judiciary, which was an older and more
familiar way of checking depravity, was rendered far more effec¬
tive by the existence of a written constitution resting directly on
popular approval. The written constitution also proved its effec¬
tiveness in later years by perpetuating in America the operation
of judicial review, of executive veto, and of a powerful upper
house of the legislature, all of which had been or would be lost
in England, where the constitution was unwritten and consisted
of customary procedures that could be altered at will by Parlia¬
ment.
Thus by the time the Revolution ended, Americans had devised
a way to establish the superiority of the people to their govern¬
ment and so to control man's tyranny over man. For the same
purpose Americans had formulated the principle that no people
5 Robert J. Taylor, ed., Massachusetts, Colony to Commonwealth: Docu¬
ments on the Formation of its Constitution , 1775—1780 (Chapel Hill, N.C.
1961), p. 45.
576 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
should exercise dominion over another people. But the way in
which they first employed the latter principle in running the new
nation did not prove satisfactory. As thirteen colonies the people
of America had joined to combat Parliamentary taxation, and the
result had been thirteen independent republics. It had been an
exhilarating experience, and it had led them almost from the
beginning to think of themselves in some degree as one people.
But the thought was not completed: they did not coalesce into
one republic with one government. Instead, as thirteen separate
and equal peoples, they set up a “perpetual union” in which they
were joined only through a Congress in which each state had one
vote. They gave the Congress responsibility for their common
concerns. But they did not give it the ordinary powers of a gov¬
ernment to tax or legislate.
Because of the straightforward equality of the member states
and because the Congress did not possess the means by which
governments generally ran to tyranny, the confederation seemed
a safe shape in which to cast the new nation. Actually danger
lurked in the fact that the Congress had insufficient power to
carry out the responsibilities which the states assigned to it. After
the British troops were defeated and the need for united action
became less obvious, state support of the Congress steadily de¬
clined. Without coercive powers, the Congress could not act
effectively either at home or abroad, and the nation was increas¬
ingly exposed to the danger of foreign depredations. At the same
time, the state governments were proving vulnerable to manipula¬
tion by corrupt or ambitious politicians and were growing power¬
ful at the expense not only of the Congress but of the people.
Some undertook irresponsible inflationary measures that threat¬
ened property rights. Unless the state governments were brought
under more effective control, local demagogues might destroy
the union and replace the tyranny of Parliament with a new
domestic brand.
Although a few men foresaw the drawbacks of a weak Con-
gress from the beginning, most people needed time to show them.
The Massachusetts legislature, perceiving that the experience of
the state could be applied to the whole United States, in 1785
suggested a national constitutional convention to create a central
authority capable of acting effectively in the interests of the
whole American people. But in 1785, Americans were not yet
convinced that what they had was inadequate. The Massachusetts
delegates to the Congress replied to their state’s suggestion with
the same arguments that had in the first place prompted Ameri-
EDMUND S. MORGAN S77
cans to base their union on a weak coordinative Congress rather
than a real national government: it would be impossible, they
said, to prevent such a government from escaping popular con¬
trol. With headquarters remote from most of its constituents, with
only a select few from each state engaged in it, a national govern¬
ment would offer too many opportunities for corruption. 6 The
fear was supported by the views of respected European political
thinkers. Montesquieu, who had been widely read in America,
maintained that republican government was suited only to small
areas. A confederation of republics might extend far, but a single
republican government of large extent would either fall a prey
to the ambitions of a few corrupt individuals, or else it would
break up into a number of smaller states. 7
These sentiments were so widely held that they prevented any
effort to establish a national government until 1787. And when
a convention was finally called in that year it was charged, not
to create a new government, but simply to revise the Articles of
Confederation. The members of the convention, without authori¬
zation, assumed the larger task and turned themselves into a
national Constitutional Convention. They did so because they
became convinced that, contrary to popular belief, a large repub¬
lic would not necessarily succumb to corruption. The man who
persuaded the Convention, insofar as any one man did it, was
James Madison, one of the delegates from Virginia.
In the month before the Convention assembled, Madison had
drawn up some observations on the “Vices of the Political System
of the United States.” Following a hint thrown out by David
Hume, he reached the conclusion that “the inconveniencies of
popular States contrary to the prevailing Theory, are in proportion
not to the extent, but to the narrowness of their limits.” In the
state governments that had operated since 1776, the great defect
was a tendency of the majority to tyrannize over the minority.
Madison took it as axiomatic that “in republican Government the
majority however composed, ultimately give the law.” Unless a
way could be found to control them, the majority would inevitably
oppress the minority, because the individuals who made up the
majority were as susceptible as any king or lord to the operation
of human depravity. The most effective curb, Madison suggested,
was to make the territory of the republic so large that a majority
6 Edmimd C. Burnett, ed.. Letters of Members of the Continental Congress
(Washington, 1921-1936), VHI, 206-210.
7 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (New York, 1949), p. 120 (Book VIII,
c. 16).
578 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
would have difficulty forming. Men being hopelessly selfish would
inevitably seek to capture die government for selfish purposes,
and in a small republic they might easily form combinations to
secure the necessary majority. But in a large republic, "the Society
becomes broken into a greater variety of interests, of pursuits of
passions, which check each other, whilst those who may feel a
common sentiment have less opportunity of communication and
concert/' 8
This insight, later given classic expression in the tenth Fed¬
eralist paper, was the most fruitful intellectual achievement of
the Revolutionary period, the third of the three principles men¬
tioned earlier. It gave Madison and his colleagues at Philadelphia
the courage to attempt a republican government for the whole
nation. The constitution which they drew up would provide the
American peoples with a government that would effectively make
them one people. The government would incorporate all the
protections to liberty that they still cherished from their British
heritage; it would preserve both imported and home-grown repub¬
lican traditions; and it would employ the political principles de¬
veloped during the Revolution. It would be a government inferior
to the people and one in which no people should have dominion
over another, a government in which almost every detail was
prompted by the framers' determination to control the operation
of human depravity. Many Americans, doubting that the safe¬
guards would work, opposed the adoption of the Constitution. But
the character of American politics from 1789 to the present day
has borne out Madison's observation: majorities in the United
States have been composed of such a variety of interests that they
have seldom proved oppressive, and the national government has
been a stronger bulwark of freedom than the state governments.
The establishment of a national republic renewed the challenge
which the contest with Great Britain had presented to the best
minds of America. In the Constitutional Convention and in the
conduct of the new national government, Americans found scope
for talents that the Revolution had uncovered. Jefferson, Hamilton,
Madison, and John Adams received from national politics the
stimulus that made them great. The writings in which they em¬
bodied their best thoughts were state papers.
In the course of the nineteenth century the stimulus was some¬
how lost, in hard cider, log cabins, and civil war. Intellect moved
8 James Madison, Writings , Gaillard Hunt, ed. (New York, 1900-1910), II,
361-369.
HANNAH ARENDT 579
away from politics; and intellectual leadership, having passed
from clergy to statesmen, moved on to philosophers, scientists,
and novelists. But during the brief period when America s intel¬
lectual leaders were her political leaders, they created for their
country the most stable popular government ever invented and
presented to the world three political principles which men have
since used repeatedly and successfully to advance human freedom
and responsible government.
Constitutio Libertatis
HANNAH ARENDT
i
That there existed men in the Old World to dream of public
freedom, that there were men in the New World who had tasted
public happiness—these were ultimately the facts which caused
the movement for restoration, for recovery of the old rights and
liberties, to develop into a revolution on either side of the Atlantic.
And no matter how far, in success and failure, events and cir¬
cumstances were to drive them apart, the Americans would still
have agreed with Robespierre on the ultimate aim of revolution,
the constitution of freedom, and on the actual business of revo¬
lutionary government, the foundation of a republic. Or perhaps
it was the other way round and Robespierre had been influenced
by the course of the American Revolution when he formulated
his famous “Principles of Revolutionary Government.” For in
America the armed uprising of the colonies and the Declaration
of Independence had been followed by a spontaneous outbreak
of constitution-making in all thirteen colonies—as though, in
John Adams’ words, “thirteen clocks had struck as one”—so that
there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between
the war of liberation, the fight for independence which was the
condition for freedom, and the constitution of the new states.
Although it is true that “the first act of the great drama,” the
From On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, 139—153, 164—178, 300—304,
306-310. Copyright © 1963 by Hannah Arendt. All rights reserved. Reprinted
by permission of The Viking Press, Inc.
580 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
"late American war,” was closed before the American Revolution
had come to an end, 1 it is equally true that these two altogether
different stages of the revolutionary process began at almost the
same moment and continued to run parallel to each other all
through the years of war.
The importance of this development can hardly be overesti¬
mated. The miracle, if such it was, that saved the American
Revolution was not that the colonists should have been strong
and powerful enough to win a war against England but that this
victory did not end “with a multitude of Commonwealths, Crimes
and Calamities . . . ; till at last the exhausted Provinces [would]
sink into Slavery under the yoke of some fortunate Conqueror,” 2
as John Dickinson had rightly feared. Such is indeed the common
fate of a rebellion which is not followed by revolution, and hence
the common fate of most so-called revolutions. If, however, one
keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the
end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scien¬
tist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian
who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage
of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to
the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and con¬
stitution, because all the dramatic aspects of his story seem to be
contained in the first stage and, perhaps, also because the turmoil
of liberation has so frequently defeated the revolution. This temp¬
tation, which befalls the historian because he is a storyteller, is
closely connected with the much more harmful theory that the
constitutions and the fever of constitution-making, far from
expressing truly the revolutionary spirit of the country, were
1 Tliere is perhaps nothing more detrimental to an understanding of revo¬
lution than the common assumption that the revolutionary process has come
to an end when liberation is achieved and the turmoil and the violence,
inherent in all wars of independence, has come to an end. This view is
not new. In 1787, Benjamin Rush complained that “there is nothing more
common, than to confound the term of American revolution with those of
the late American war . The American war is over: but this is far from
being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but
the first act of the great drama is closed. It re mains yet to establish and
perfect our new forms of government.” (In Hezeklah Niles, Principles and
Acts of the Revolution [Baltimore, 1822] p. 402.) We may add that there still
is nothing more common than to confound the travail of liberation with the
foundation of freedom.
JThese fears were expressed in 1765, in a letter to William Pitt in which
Dickinson had voiced his assurance that the colonies would win a war
against England. See Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic , 1763-
89 , Chicago, 1956, p. 136.
HANNAH ARENDT 581
in fact due to forces of reaction and either defeated the revolution
or prevented its full development, so that—logically enough—the
Constitution of the United States, the true culmination of this
revolutionary process, is understood as the actual result of
counter-revolution. The basic misunderstanding lies in the failure
to distinguish between liberation and freedom; there is nothing
more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed
by the constitution of the newly won freedom. For “neither morals,
nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do
without a constitution” (John Adams).
Yet even if one resists this temptation to equate revolution with
the struggle for liberation, instead of identifying revolution with
the foundation of freedom, there remains the additional, and in
our context more serious, difficulty that there is very little in
form or content of the new revolutionary constitutions which was
even new, let alone revolutionary. The notion of constitutional
government is of course by no means revolutionary in content or
origin; it means nothing more or less than government limited
by law, and the safeguard of civil liberties through constitutional
guarantees, as spelled out by the various bills of rights which
were incorporated into the new constitutions and which are
frequendy regarded as their most important part, never intended
to spell out the new revolutionary powers of the people but, on
the contrary, were felt to be necessary in order to limit the power
of government even in the newly founded body politic. A bill of
rights, as Jefferson remarked, was “what the people are entitied
to against every government on earth, general or particular, and
what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” 3
In other words, constitutional government was even then, as it
still is today, limited government in the sense in which the
eighteenth century spoke of a "limited monarchy,” namely, a
monarchy limited in its power by virtue of laws. Civil liberties as
well as private welfare lie within the range of limited government,
and their safeguard does not depend upon the form of govern¬
ment. Only tyranny, according to political theory a bastard form
of government, does away with constitutional, namely, lawful
government. However, the liberties which the laws of constitu¬
tional government guarantee are all of a negative character, and
this includes the right of representation for the purposes of taxa¬
tion which later became the right to vote; they are indeed “not
3 In a letter to James Madison of December 20, 1787.
582 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
powers of themselves, but merely an exemption from the abuses
of power”; 4 they claim not a share in government but a safeguard
against government. Whether we trace the notion of this constitu¬
tionalism back to Magna Charta and hence to feudal rights,
privileges, and pacts concluded between the royal power and the
estates of the kingdom, or whether, on the contrary, we assume
that "nowhere do we find modem constitutionalism until an effec¬
tive central government has been brought into existence,” 5 is
relatively unimportant in our context. If no more had ever been
at stake in the revolutions than this kind of constitutionalism, it
would be as though the revolutions had remained true to their
modest beginnings when they still could be understood as attempts
at restoration of "ancient” liberties; the truth of the matter, how¬
ever, is that this was not the case.
There is another and perhaps even more potent reason why we
find it difficult to recognize the truly revolutionary element in
constitution-making. If we take our bearings not by the revolu¬
tions of the eighteenth century but by the series of upheavals
that followed upon them throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, it seems as though we are left with the alternative
between revolutions which become permanent, which do not come
to an end and do not produce their end, the foundation of free¬
dom, and those where in the aftermath of revolutionary upheaval
some new "constitutional” government eventually comes into
existence that guarantees a fair amount of civil liberties and de¬
serves, whether in the form of a monarchy or a republic, no more
than the name of limited government. The first of these alterna¬
tives clearly applies to the revolutions in Russia and China, where
those in power not only admit that fact but boast of having main¬
tained indefinitely a revolutionary government; the second alterna¬
nt is seldom recognized and of some importance that, to put it in Wood-
row Wilson's words, "power is a positive thing, control a negative thing,”
and that "to call these two things by the same name is simply to impoverish
language by making one word serve for a variety of meanings” (An Old
Master and Other Political Essays, 1893, p. 91). This confusion of the
power to act with the right to control the "organs of initiative” is of a
somewhat similar nature as the previously mentioned confusion of liberation
with freedom. The quotation in the text is from James Fenimore Cooper,
The American Democrat (1838).
®The latter is the view of Carl Joachim Friedrich, Constitutional Govern¬
ment and Democracy, revised edition, 1950. For the former—that "the
clauses in our American constitutions are . . . mere copies of the thirty-ninth
article of Magna Charta”—see Charles E. Shattuck, “The True Me anin g of
the Term Tiberty' in the Federal and State Constitutions,” Harvard Law
Review, 1891.
HANNAH ARINDT 583
tive applies to the revolutionary upheavals which swept nearly all
European countries after the First World War, as well as to many
colonial countries that won their independence from European
rule after the Second World War. In these cases, constitutions
were by no means the result of revolution; they were imposed, on
the contrary, after a revolution had failed, and they were, at least
in the eyes of the people living under them, the sign of its defeat,
not of its victory. They were usually the work of experts, though
not in the sense in which Gladstone had called the American
Constitution "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given
time by the brain and purpose of man,” but rather in the sense
in which Arthur Young even in 1792 felt that the French had
adopted the "new word,” which "they use as if a constitution was
a pudding to he made by a recipe.” 6 Their purpose was to stem
the tide of revolution, and if they too served to limit power, it was
the power of the government as well as the revolutionary power
of the people whose manifestation had preceded their establish¬
ment.
One, and perhaps not the least, of the troubles besetting a
discussion of these matters is merely verbal. The word "constitu¬
tion” obviously is equivocal in that it means the act of constitut¬
ing as well as the law or rules of government that are consti¬
tuted ” be these embodied in written documents or, as in the case
of the British constitution, implied in institutions, customs, and
precedents. It is clearly impossible to call by the same name and
to expect the same results from those "constitutions” which a
non-revolutionary government adopts because the people and
their revolution had been unable to constitute their own govern¬
ment, and those other "constitutions” which either, in Gladstone s
phrase, ‘had proceeded from progressive history” of a nation or
were the result of the deliberate attempt by a whole people at
founding a new body politic. The distinction as well as the con¬
fusion are perfectly apparent in the famous definition of the word
by Thomas Paine, a definition in which he only summed up and
reasoned out what the fever of American constitution-making
6 Quoted from Charles Howard Mcllwain, Constitutionalism , Ancient and
Modem , Ithaca, 1940. Those who wish to see this matter in historical per¬
spective may recall the fate of Locke’s constitution for Carolina, which was
perhaps the first constitution framed by an expert and then offered to a
people. William C. Morey’s verdict, “It was created out of nothing, and it
soon relapsed into nothing,” has been true for almost all of them (“The
Genesis of a Written Constitution,” in American Academy of Politics and
Social Science, Annals I, April, 1891).
584 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
must have taught him: "A constitution is not the act of a govern¬
ment, but of a people constituting a government/’ 7 Hence the
need in France as in America for constituent assemblies and
special conventions whose sole task it was to draft a constitution;
hence also the need to bring the draft home and back to the
people and have the Articles of Confederacy debated, clause by
clause, in the town-hall meetings and, later, the articles of the
Constitution in the state congresses. For the point of the matter
was not at all that the provincial congresses of the thirteen
colonies could not be trusted to establish state governments whose
powers were properly and sufficiently limited, but that it had
become a principle with the constituents "that the people should
endow the government with a constitution and not vice versa.” 8
A brief glance at the various destinies of constitutional govern¬
ment outside the Anglo-American countries and spheres of influ¬
ence should be enough to enable us to grasp the enormous differ¬
ence in power and authority between a constitution imposed by a
government upon a people and the constitution by which a people
constitutes its own government. The constitutions of experts
under which Europe came to live after the First World War were
all based, to a large extent, upon the model of the American
Constitution, and taken by themselves they should have worked
well enough. Yet the mistrust they have always inspired in the
people living under them is a matter of historical record as is the
fact that fifteen years after the downfall of monarchical govern¬
ment on the European continent more than half of Europe lived
under some sort of dictatorship, while the remaining constitutional
governments, with the conspicuous exception of the Scandinavian
countries and of Switzerland, shared the sad lack of power, au-
7 Or, phrased somewhat differently: “A constitution is a thing antecedent
to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution.”
Both phrases occur in the second part of The Rights of Man.
8 According to Morgan, op. cit., “Most states allowed their provincial
congresses to assume the task of drafting a constitution and putting it into
effect. The people of Massachusetts seem to have been the first to see the
danger of tius procedure. . . . Accordingly a special convention was held
in 1780 and a constitution established by the people acting independently
of government. . . . Though by this time it was too late for the states to
use it, the new method was shortly followed in creating a government for
the United States” (p. 91). Even Forrest McDonald, who holds that the
state legislatures were "circumvented” and ratifying conventions elected
because "ratification would [have been] much more difficult ... if the
Constitution had to overcome the machinations ... of the legislatures,”
concedes in a footnote: "In point of legal theory, ratification by state legis¬
latures would be no more binding than any other laws and could be re¬
pealed by subsequent legislatures.” See We the People: The Economic Ori¬
gins of the Constitution, Chicago, 1958, p. 114.
HANNAH ARENDT 585
thority, and stability which even then was already the outstanding
characteristic of the Third Republic in France. For lack of power
and the concomitant want of authority have been the curse of
constitutional government in nearly all European countries since
the abolition of absolute monarchies, and the fourteen constitu¬
tions of France between 1789 and 1875 have caused, even before
the rainfall of postwar constitutions in the twentieth century, the
very word to become a mockery. Finally, we may remember, the
periods of constitutional government were nicknamed times of
the “system” (in Germany after the First World War and in
France after the Second), a word by which the people indicated a
state of affairs where legality itself was submerged in a system of
half-corrupt connivances from which every right-minded person
should be permitted to excuse himself since it hardly seemed
worth while even to rise in revolt against it. In short, and in the
words of John Adams, “a constitution is a standard, a pillar, and
a bond when it is understood, approved and beloved. But with¬
out this intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite
or balloon, flying in the air.” 9
The difference between a constitution that is the act of govern¬
ment and the constitution by which people constitute a govern¬
ment is obvious enough. To it must be added another difference
which, though closely connected with it, is much more difficult to
perceive. If there was anything which the constitution-makers of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had in common with their
American ancestors in the eighteenth century, it was a mistrust
in power as such, and this mistrust was perhaps even more pro¬
nounced in the New World than it ever had been in the old coun¬
tries. That man by his very nature is “unfit to be trusted with
unlimited power,” that those who wield power are likely to turn
into “ravenous beasts of prey,” that government is necessary in
order to restrain man and his drive for power and, therefore, is
(as Madison put it) a “reflection upon human nature”—these
were commonplaces in the eighteenth century no less than in the
nineteenth, and they were deeply ingrained in the minds of the
Founding Fathers. All this stands behind the bills of rights, and it
formed the general agreement on the absolute necessity of con¬
stitutional government in the sense of limited government; and
yet, for the American development it was not decisive. The
founders’ fear of too much power in government was checked by
^Quoted from Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress,
Cambridge, Mass., 1952, p. 221.
586 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
their great awareness of the enormous dangers to the rights and
liberties of the citizen that would arise from within society. Hence,
according to Madison, “it is of great importance in a republic, not
only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but
to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other
part,” to save “the rights of individuals, or of the minority . . .
from interested combinations of the majority.” 10 This, if nothing
else, required the constitution of public, governmental power
whose very essence could never be derived from something which
is a mere negative, i.e., constitutional limited government, al¬
though European constitution-makers and constitutionalists saw
in it the quintessence of the blessings of the American Constitu¬
tion. What they admired, and from the viewpoint of Continental
history rightly, was in fact the blessings of “mild government” as
it had developed organically out of British history, and since these
blessings were not only incorporated into all constitutions of the
New World but most emphatically spelled out as the inalienable
rights of all men, they failed to understand, on one hand, the
enormous, overriding importance of the foundation of a republic
and, on the other, the fact that the actual content of the Constitu¬
tion was by no means the safeguard of civil liberties but the
establishment of an entirely new system of power.
In this respect, the record of the American Revolution speaks
an entirely clear, unambiguous language. It was not constitu¬
tionalism in the sense of ‘limited,” lawful government that pre¬
occupied the minds of the founders. On this they were agreed be¬
yond the need for discussion or even clarification, and even in
the days when feeling against England’s king and Parliament ran
highest in the country, they remained somehow conscious of the
fact that they still dealt with a “limited monarchy” and not with
an absolute prince. When they declared their independence from
this government, and after they had forsworn their allegiance to
the crown, the main question for them certainly was not how to
limit power but how to establish it, not how to limit government
but how to found a new one. The fever of constitution-making
which gripped the country immediately after the Declaration of
Independence prevented the development of a power vacuum,
and the establishment of new power could not be based upon
what had always been essentially a negative on power, that is,
the bills of rights.
This whole matter is so easily and frequently confused because
10 See The Federalist , no. 51.
HANNAH ARENDX 5&7
of the important part the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen” came to play in the course of the French Revolution,
where these rights indeed were assumed not to indicate the limita¬
tions of all lawful government, but on the contrary to be its very
foundation. Quite apart from the fact that the declaration All
men are bom equal,” fraught with truly revolutionary implications
in a country which still was feudal in social and poltical organi¬
zation, had no such implications in the New World, there is the
even more important difference in emphasis with regard to the
only absolutely new aspect in the enumeration of civil rights, and
that is that these rights were now declared solemnly to be rights
of all men, no matter who they were or where they lived. T is
difference in emphasis came about when the Americans, though
quite sure that what they claimed from England were the rights
of Englishmen,” could no longer think of themselves in terms of
“a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates
(Burke); even the trickle of immigrants of non-English nad non-
British stock in their midst was enough to remind them: Whether
you be English, Irish, Germans, or Swedes, . . . you are entitled
to all the liberties of Englishmen and the freedom of this consti-
tuition” 11 What they were saying and proclaiming was in fact
that those rights which up to now had been enjoyed only by
Englishmen should be enjoyed in the future by all men 12 —m
other words, all men should live under constitutional, limite
government. The proclamation of human rights through the
French Revolution, on the contrary, meant quite literally that
every man by virtue of being bom had become the owner of cer¬
tain rights. The consequences of this shifted emphasis are enor¬
mous, in practice no less than in theory. The American version
actually proclaims no more than the necessity of civilized govern¬
ment for all mankind; the French version, however, proclaims the
existence of rights independent of and outside the body politic,
and then goes on to equate these so-called rights, namely the
rights of man qua man, with the rights of citizens. In our context,
we do not need to insist on the perplexities inherent in the very
^These are the words of a Pennsylvanian, and Pennsylvania, the most
thoroughly cosmopolitan colony, had almost as many people of Enghsli
descent as of all other nationalities put together.” See Clinton Rossiter, The
First American Revolution, New York, 1956, pp. 20 and 228.
i=Even in the early sixties, “James Otis envisaged the transformation
■within the British constitution of the common-law rights of Englishmen
into the natural rights of man, hut he also saw these natinral“
limitations upon the authority of • government. William S. Carpenter, The
Development of American Political Thought , Princeton, 1930, p.
588 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
concept of human rights nor on the sad inefficacy of all declara¬
tions, proclamations, or enumerations of human rights that were
not immediately incorporated into positive law, the law of the
land, and applied to those who happened to live there. The trouble
with these rights has always been that they could not but be less
than the rights of nationals, and that they were invoked only as a
last resort by those who had lost their normal rights as citizens. 13
We need only to ward off from our considerations the fateful mis¬
understanding, suggested by the course of the French Revolution,
that the proclamation of human rights or the guarantee of civil
rights could possibly become the aim or content of revolution.
The aim of the state constitutions which preceded the Constitu¬
tion of the Union, whether drafted by provincial congresses or by
constitutional assemblies (as in the case of Massachusetts), was
to create new centers of power after the Declaration of Independ¬
ence had abolished the authority and power of crown and Parlia¬
ment. On this task, the creation of new power, the founders and
men of the Revolution brought to bear the whole arsenal of what
they themselves called their "political science,” for political sci¬
ence, in their own words, consisted in trying to discover "the
forms and combinations of power in republics.” 14 Highly aware
of their own ignorance on the subject, they turned to history,
collecting with a care amounting to pedantry all examples, an¬
cient and modem, real and fictitious, of republican constitutions;
what they tried to learn in order to dispel their ignorance was
by no means the safeguards of civil liberties—a subject on which
they certainly knew much more than any previous republic—
but the constitution of power. This was also the reason for the
enormous fascination exerted by Montesquieu, whose role in the
American Revolution almost equals Rousseau’s influence on the
course of the French Revolution; for the main subject of Montes¬
quieu’s great work, studied and quoted as an authority on govern¬
ment at least a decade before the outbreak of the Revolution, was
indeed "the constitution of political freedom,” 15 but the word
“On the perplexities, historical and conceptual, of the Rights of Man,
see the extensive discussion in the author’s Origins of Totalitarianism , re¬
vised edition. New York, 1958, pp. 290-302.
14 The words are Benjamin Rush’s in Niles, op. cit., p. 402.
15 No other passage from the “divine writings” of the “great Montesquieu”
is more frequently quoted in the debates than the famous sentence about
England: “II y a aussi une nation dans le monde qui a pour objet direct
de sa constitution la liberte politique” ( Esprit des Lois, XI, 5). For the
enormous influence of Montesquieu on the course of the American Revolu¬
tion, see especially Paul Merrill Spurlin, Montesquieu in America , 1760-1801 ,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1940, and Gilbert Chinard, The Commonplace Book
of Thomas Jefferson , Baltimore and Paris, 1926.
HANNAH ARENDT 589
“constitution” in this context has lost all connotations of being a
negative, a limitation and negation of power; the word means, on
the contrary, that the “grand temple of federal liberty’ must be
based on the foundation and correct distribution of power. It was
precisely because Montesquieu—unique in this respect among
the sources from which the founders drew their political wisdom
—had maintained that power and freedom belonged together,
that, conceptually speaking, political freedom did not reside in
the I-will but in the I-can, and that therefore the political realm
must be construed and constituted in a way in which power and
freedom would be combined, that we find his name invoked in
practically all debates on constitution. 16 Montesquieu confirmed
what the founders, from the experience of the colonies, knew to
be right, namely, that liberty was “a natural Power of doing or not
doing whatever we have a Mind,” and when we read in the earliest
documents of colonial times that “deputyes thus chosen shall
have power and liberty to appoynt” we can still hear how natural
it was for these people to use the two words almost as synonyms. 17
It is well known that no question played a greater role in these
debates than did the problem of the separation or the balance of
powers, and it is perfectly true that the notion of such a separa¬
tion was by no means Montesquieu’s exclusive discovery. As a
matter of fact, the idea itself—far from being the outgrowth of a
mechanical, Newtonian world view, as has recently been sug¬
gested—is very old; it occurs, at least implicitly, in the traditional
discussion of mixed forms of government and thus can be traced
back to Aristotle, or at least to Polybius, who was perhaps the first
to be aware of some of the advantages inherent in mutual checks
and balances. Montesquieu seems to have been unaware of this
historical background; he had taken his bearings by what he
believed to be the unique structure of the English constitution,
and whether or not he interpreted this constitution correctly is of
no relevance today and was of no great importance even in the
eighteenth century. For Montesquieu’s discovery actually con¬
cerned the nature of power, and this discovery stands in so fla¬
grant a contradiction to all conventional notions on this matter
16 Montesquieu distinguishes between philosophic freedom, which consists
"in the exercise of will” (Esprit des Lois XH, 2), and political freedom,
which consists in pouvoir faire ce que Von doit vouloir (ibid., XI, 3),
whereby the emphasis is on the word pouvoir. The element of power in
political freedom is strongly suggested by the French language, in which
the same word, pouvoir, signifies power and "to be able.”
17 See Rossiter, op. cit., p. 231, and "The Fundamental Orders of Connect¬
icut” of 1639 in Documents of American History, Henry Steele Commager,
ed., New York, 1949, 5th edition.
590 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
that it has almost been forgotten, despite the fact that the founda¬
tion of the republic in America was largely inspired by it. The dis¬
covery, contained in one sentence, spells out the forgotten princi¬
ple underlying the whole structure of separated powers: that only
“power arrests power,” that is, we must add, without destroying
it, without putting impotence in the place of power. 18 For power
can of course be destroyed by violence; this is what happens in
tyrannies, where the violence of one destroys the power of the
many, and which therefore, according to Montesquieu, are de¬
stroyed from within: they perish because they engender impotence
instead of power. But power, contrary to what we are inclined to
think, cannot be checked, at least not reliably, by laws, for the
so-called power of the ruler which is checked in constitutional,
18 The sentence occurs in XI, 4 and reads as follows: “Pour qu’on ne
puisse abuser du pouvoir, il faut que, par la disposition des choses, le
pouvoir arrete le pouvior.” At first glance, even in Montesquieu this seems
to mean no more than that the power of the laws must check the power
of men. But this first impression is misleading, for Montesquieu does not
speak of laws in the sense of imposed standards and commands but, in
full agreement with the Roman tradition, understands by laws les rapports
qui se trouvent entre [une raison primitive] et les dijferents $tres } et les
rapports de ces divers itres entre eux (I, 1). Law, in other words, is what
relates, so that religious law is what relates man to God and human law
what relates men to their fellow men. (See also Book XXVI, where the
first paragraphs of the whole work are treated in detail.) Without divine
law there would be no relation between man and God, without human law
the space between men would be a desert, or rather there would be no
in-between space at all. It is within this domain of rapports , or lawfulness,
that power is being exerted; non-separation of power is not the negation
of lawfulness, it is the negation of freedom. According to Montesquieu, one
could very well abuse power and stay within the limits of the law; the
need for limitation— la vertu meme a besoin de limites (XI, 4)—arises out
of the nature of human power, and not out of an antagonism between
law and power.
Montesquieu’s separation of power, because it is so intimately connected
with the theory of checks and balances, has often been blamed on the
scientific, Newtonian spirit of the time. Yet nothing could be more alien
to Montesquieu than the spirit of modem science. This spirit, it is true, is
present in James Harrington and his “balance of property,” as it is present
in Hobbes; no doubt this terminology drawn from the sciences carried even
then a great deal of plausibility—as when John Adams praises Harrington’s
doctrine for being “as infallible a maxim in politics as that action and
reaction are equal in mechanics.” Still, one may suspect that It was pre¬
cisely Montesquieu’s political, non-scientific language which contributed
much to his influence; at any rate, it was in a non-scientific and non¬
mechanical spirit and quite obviously under the influence of Montesquieu
that Jefferson asserted that “the government we fought for . . . should not
only be founded on free principles” (by which he meant the principles of
l i mi ted government), “but in which the powers of government should be
so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no
one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked
and restrained by the others.” Notes on the State of Virginia , query XHI.
HANNAH ARENDT 591
limited, lawful government is in fact not power but violence, it is
the multiplied strength of the one who has monopolized the power
of the many. Laws, on the other hand, are always in danger of
being abolished by the power of the many, and in a conflict be¬
tween law and power it is seldom the law which will emerge as
victor. Yet even if we assure that law is capable of checking power
—and on this assumption all truly democratic forms of govern¬
ment must rest if they are not to degenerate into the worst and
most arbitrary tyranny— the limitation which laws set upon power
can only result in a decrease of its potency. Power can be stopped
and still be kept intact only by power, so that the principle of the
separation of power not only provides a guarantee against the mo¬
nopolization of power by one part of the government, but actually
provides a kind of mechanism, built into the very heart of govern¬
ment, through which new power is constantly generated, without,
however, being able to overgrow and expand to the detriment of
other centers or sources of power. Montesquieu's famous insight
that even virtue stands in need of limitation and that even an
excess of reason is undesirable occurs in his discussion of the na¬
ture of power; 19 to him, virtue and reason were powers rather
than mere faculties, so that their preservation and increase had
to be subject to the same conditions which rule over the preserva¬
tion and increase of power. Certainly it was not because he wanted
less virtue and less reason that Montesquieu demanded their
limitation.
This side of the matter is usually overlooked because we think
of the division of power only in terms of its separation in the
three brandies of government. The chief problem of the founders,
however, was how to establish union out of thirteen "sovereign,"
duly constituted republics; their task was the foundation of a "con¬
federate republic" which—in the language of the time, borrowed
from Montesquieu -would reconcile the advantages of monarchy
in foreign affairs with those of republicanism in domestic policy. 20
^Esprit den Lois XI, 4 and 6,
^Thus, James Wilson held that “a Federal Republic . . . as a species of
government . . . secures all the internal advantages of a republic; at the
same time that it maintains the external dignity and force of a monarchy”
(quoted from Spurlin, op. cit, p. 206). Hamilton, The Federalist, no. 9,
arguing against the opponents of the new Constitution who, “with great
assiduity, cited and circulated the observations of Montesquieu on the neces¬
sity of a contracted territory for a republican government,” quoted at length
from VEsprit de$ Lois to show that Montesquieu “explicitly treats of a
Confederate Republic as the expedient for extending the sphere of popular
government, and reconciling the advantages of monarchy with those of
republicanism,”
592 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
And in this task of the Constitution there was no longer any ques¬
tion of constitutionalism in the sense of civil rights—even though
a Bill of Rights was then incorporated into the Constitution as
amendments, as a necessary supplement to it—but of erecting a
system of powers that would check and balance in such a way
that the power neither of the union nor of its parts, the duly con¬
stituted states, would decrease or destroy one another.
How well this part of Montesquieu’s teaching was understood
in the days of the foundation of the republic! On the level of
theory, its greatest defender was John Adams, whose entire politi¬
cal thought turned about the balance of powers. And when he
wrote: ‘Tower must be opposed to power, force to force, strength
to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason,
eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion,” he obviously
believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to
generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to
abolish them. 21 On the level of practice and the erection of institu¬
tions, we may best turn to Madison’s argument on the proportion
and balancing of power between the federal and the state govern¬
ments. Had he believed in the current notions of the indivisibility
of power—that divided power is less power 22 —he would have con¬
cluded that the new power of the union must be founded on
powers surrendered by the states, so that the stronger the union
was to be, the weaker its constituent parts were to become. His
point, however, was that the very establishment of the Union had
founded a new source of power which in no way drew its strength
from the powers of the states, as it had not been established at
their expense. Thus he insisted: “Not the states ought to surrender
their powers to the national government, rather the powers of the
central government should be greatly enlarged. . . . It should be
set as a check upon the exercise by the state governments of the
^From Haraszti, op. cit., p. 219.
“Such notions, of course, were also quite current in America. Thus John
Taylor of Virginia argued against John Adams as follows: "Mr. Adams
considers our division of power as the same principle with his balance of
power. We consider these principles as opposite and inimical. . . . Our
principle of division is used to reduce power to that degree of temperature
which may make it a blessing and not a curse. . . . Mr. Adams contends
for a government of orders, as if power would be a safe sentinel over
power, or the devil over Lucifer. . . (See William C. Carpenter, op. cit .)
Taylor, because of his mistrust in power, has been called the philosopher
of Jeffersonian democracy; however, the truth of the matter is that Jefferson,
no less than Adams or Madison, emphatically held that it was the balancing
of powers and not the division of power which was the proper remedy for
despotism.
HANNAH ABENDT 593
considerable powers which must still remain with them/’ 23 Hence,
“if [the governments of the particular states] were abolished, the
general government would be compelled by the principle of self-
preservation to reinstate them in their proper jurisdiction.” 24 In
this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest
American innovation in politics as such was the consistent aboli¬
tion of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the in¬
sight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny
are the same. The defect of the Confederacy was that there had
been no “partition of power between the General and the Local
Governments”; and that it had acted as the central agency of an
alliance rather than as a government; experience had shown that
in this alliance of powers there was a dangerous tendency for the
allied powers not to act as checks upon one another but to cancel
one another out, that is, to breed impotence. 25 What the founders
were afraid of in practice was not power but impotence, and their
fears were intensified by the view of Montesquieu, quoted through¬
out these discussions, that republican government was effective
only in relatively small territories. Hence, the discussion turned
about the very viability of the republican form of government, and
both Hamilton and Madison called attention to another view of
Montesquieu, according to which a confederacy of republics could
solve the problems of larger countries under the condition that the
constituted bodies—small republics—were capable of constituting
a new body politic, the confederate republic, instead of resigning
themselves to a mere alliance. 26
Clearly, the true objective of the American Constitution was not
to limit power but to create more power, actually to establish and
duly constitute an entirely new power center, destined to compen¬
sate the confederate republic, whose authority was to be exerted
over a large, expanding territory, for the power lost through the
separation of the colonies from the English crown. This compli¬
cated and delicate system, deliberately designed to keep the power
potential of the republic intact and prevent any of the multiple
power sources from drying up in the event of further expansion,
“of being increased by the addition of other members,” was entirely
“See Edward S. Corwin, "The Progress of Constitutional Theory between
the Declaration of Independence and the Meeting of the Philadelphia Con¬
vention,” American Historical Review, Yol. 30, 1925.
“The Federalist, no. 14.
“Madison in a letter to Jefferson, October 24, 1787, in Max Farr and.
Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, New Haven, 1937, vol. 3, p. 137.
“For H amil ton, see note 20; for Madison, The Federalist, no. 43.
594 reinterpretation of the American revolution
the child of revolution. 27 The American Constitution finally con¬
solidated the power of the Revolution, and since the aim of revo¬
lution was freedom, it indeed came to be what Bracton had called
Constitute Libertatis, the foundation of freedom.
To believe that the short-lived European postwar constitutions
or even their predecessors in the nineteenth century, whose inspir¬
ing principle had been distrust of power in general and fear of the
revolutionary power of the people in particular, could constitute
the same form of government as the American Constitution, which
had sprung from confidence in having discovered a power prin¬
ciple strong enough to found a perpetual union, is to be fooled by
words.
II
The great and fateful misfortune of the French Revolution was
that none of the constituent assemblies could command enough
authority to lay down the law of the land; the reproach rightly
leveled against them was always the same: they lacked the power
to constitute by definition; they themselves were unconstitutional.
Theoretically, the fateful blunder of the men of the French Revo¬
lution consisted in their almost automatic, uncritical belief that
power and law spring from the selfsame source. Conversely, the
great good fortune of the American Revolution was that the people
of the colonies, prior to their conflict with England, were organized
in self-governing bodies, that the revolution—to speak the lan¬
guage of the eighteenth century—did not throw them into a state
of nature, 28 that there never was any serious questioning of the
pouvovr constituant of those who framed the state constitutions
and, eventually, the Constitution of the United States. What Madi-
rnJSSf ^ s0 °i comi nenting on Montesquieu’s Federal Republic, explicitly
“?^ons that it consists in assembling distinct societies which are col-
“ t0 a new tody, capable of being increased by the addition of
of expandm S <l u aUty peculiarly fitted to tibte circumstances
ot America (Spurkn, op. cit., p. 206).
S8T j at . t ^,? re e 2? sted a i ew isolated instances in which resolutions were
passed to the effect that “the whole procedure of the Congress^
ftrfww,t na1, and l *t t “7 hen ito Declaration of Independence took place,
were absolutely in a state of nature,” is of course no argument
For 1116 res °lutons of some New Hampshire towns, see Merrill
Q^ky ^°Z* C l 1957. AmeriCan ReVOluti ° n ’” Kington Library
HANNAH ARENDT 595
son proposed with respect to the American Constitution, namely,
to derive its “general authority . . . entirely from the subordinate
authorities ,” 29 repeated only on a national scale what had been
done by the colonies themselves when they constituted their state
governments. The delegates to the provincial congresses or popular
conventions which drafted the constitutions for state governments
had derived their authority from a number of subordinate, duly
authorized bodies—districts, counties, townships; to preserve these
bodies unimpaired in their power was to preserve the source of
their own authority intact. Had the Federal Convention, instead of
creating and constituting the new federal power, chosen to curtail
and abolish state powers, the founders would have met immedi¬
ately the perplexities of their French colleagues; they would have
lost their pouvior constituant —and this, probably, was one of the
reasons why even the most convinced supporters of a strong cen¬
tral government did not want to abolish the powers of state gov¬
ernments altogether . 30 Not only was the federal system the sole
alternative to the nation-state principle; it was also the only way
not to be trapped in the vicious circle of pouvoir constituant and
pouvoir constitue.
The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence was
preceded, accompanied, and followed by constitution-making in
all thirteen colonies revealed all of a sudden to what an extent an
entirely new concept of power and authority, an entirely novel
idea of what was of prime importance in the political realm had
already developed in the New World, even though the inhabitants
of this world spoke and thought in the terms of the Old World
and referred to the same sources for inspiration and confirmation
of their theories. What was lacking in the Old World were the
townships of the colonies, and, seen with the eye of a European
observer, “the American Revolution broke out, and the doctrine
of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and
took possession of the state .” 31 Those who received the power to
^In a letter to Jefferson, October 24, 1787, in Farrand, Records of the
Federal Convention, HI, p. 137.
^Winton U. Solberg, in bis introduction to The Federal Convention and
the Formation of the Union of the American States, New York, 1958, rightly
stresses that the Federalists "wished definitely to subordinate the states, but
they did not, with two exceptions, desire to destroy the states” (p. cii).
Madison himself once said ‘he would preserve the State rights as carefully
as the trials by jury” (ibid., p. 196).
^TocqueviUe, Democracy in America, New York, 1945, vol. I, p. 56. The
extraordinary degree of political articulation of the country may be realized
by the fact that there were more than 550 such towns in New England alone
in 1776.
596 reinterpretation of the American revolution
constitute, to frame constitutions, were duly elected delegates of
constituted bodies; they received their authority from below, and
when they held fast to the Roman principle that the seat of power
lay in the people, they did not think in terms of a fiction and an
absolute, the nation above all authority and absolved from all laws,
but in terms of a working reality, the organized multitude whose
power was exerted in accordance with laws and limited by them.
The American revolutionary insistence on the distinction between a
republic and a democracy or majority rule hinges on the radical
separation of law and power, with clearly recognized different
origins, different legitimations, and different spheres of application.
What the American Revolution actually did was to bring the
new American experience and the new American concept of
power out into the open. Like prosperity and equality of condition,
this new power concept was older than the Revolution, but unlike
the social and economic happiness of the New World—which
would have resulted in abundance and affluence under almost any
form of government—it would hardly have survived without the
foundation of a new body politic, designed explicitly to preserve
it; without revolution, in other words, the new power principle
would have remained hidden, it might have fallen into oblivion
or be remembered as a curiosity, of interest to anthropologists and
local historians, but of no interest to statecraft and political
thought.
Power—as the men of the American Revolution understood it
as a matter of course because it was embodied in all institutions
of self-government throughout the country—was not only prior
to the Revolution, it was in a sense prior to the colonization of
the continent. The Mayflower Compact was drawn up on the ship
and signed upon landing. For our argument, it is perhaps of no
great relevance, though it would be interesting to know, whether
the Pilgrims had been prompted to "covenant" because of the bad
weather which prevented their landing farther south within the
jurisdiction of the Virginia Company that had granted them their
patent, or whether they felt the need to "combine themselves
together because the London recruits were an "undesirable lot"
challenging the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company and threat¬
ening to "use their owne liberties in either case, they obviously
feared the so-called state of nature, the untrod wilderness, un¬
limited by any boundary, as well as the unlimited initiative of
th T^ a 1 find rather suggestive, is contained in
™f £ huS l ttS a f tacle m ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition,
. F 2 r the P^aps more probable alternative, see the introduction
to the Mayflower Compact” in Commager, op. cit.
HANNAH ARENDT 597
men bound by no law. This fear is not surprising; it is the justified
fear of civilized men who, for whatever reasons, have decided to
leave civilization behind them and strike out on their own. The
really astounding fact in the whole story is that their obvious fear
of one another was accompanied by the no less obvious confidence
they had in their own power, granted and confirmed by no one
and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to combine
themselves together into a "civil Body Politick” which, held to¬
gether solely by the strength of mutual promise "in the Presence
of God and one another,” supposedly was powerful enough to "en¬
act, constitute, and frame” all necessary laws and instruments of
government. This deed quickly became a precedent, and when, less
than twenty years later, colonists from Massachusetts emigrated
to Connecticut, they framed their own "Fundamental Orders” and
"plantation covenant” in a still uncharted wilderness, so that when
the royal charter finally arrived to unite the new settlement into
the colony of Connecticut it sanctioned and confirmed an already
existing system of government. And precisely because the royal
charter of 1662 had only sanctioned the Fundamental Orders of
1639, the selfsame charter could be adopted in 1776, virtually un¬
changed, as "the Civil Constitution of this State under the sole
authority of the people thereof, independent of any King and
Prince whatever.”
Since the colonial covenants had originally been made without
any reference to king or prince, it was as though the Revolution
liberated the power of covenant and constitution-making as it had
shown itself in the earliest days of colonization. The unique and
all-decisive distinction between the settlements of North America
and all other colonial enterprises was that only the British emi¬
grants had insisted, from the very beginning, that they constitute
themselves into "civil bodies politic.” These bodies, moreover, were
not conceived as governments, strictly speaking; they did not
imply rule and the division of the people into rulers and ruled.
The best proof of this is the simple fact that the people thus con¬
stituted could remain, for more than a hundred and fifty years,
the royal subjects of the government of England. These new bodies
politic really were "political societies,” and their great importance
for the future lay in the formation of a political realm that enjoyed
power and was entitled to claim rights without possessing or
claiming sovereignty. 33 The greatest revolutionary innovation,
Madison's discovery of the federal principle for the foundation of
^The important distinction between states that axe sovereign and those
that are “only political societies” was made by Madison in a speech in the
Federal Convention. See Solberg, op. cit. 3 p. 189, note 8.
59& REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
large republics, was partly based upon an experience, upon the
intimate knowledge of political bodies whose internal structure
predetermined them, as it were, and conditioned its members for
a constant enlargement whose principle was neither expansion
nor conquest but the further combination of powers. For not only
the basic federal principle of uniting separate and independently
constituted bodies, but also the name “confederation” in the sense
of “combination” or “cosociation” was actually discovered in the
earliest times of colonial history, and even the new name of the
union to be called United States of America was suggested by the
short-lived New England Confederation to be “called by the name
of United Colonies of New England.” 34 And it was this experience,
rather than any theory, which emboldened Madison to elaborate
and affirm a casual remark of Montesquieu, namely that the re¬
publican form of government, if based upon the federal principle,
was appropriate for large and growing territories. 35
**See the “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut” of 1639 and “The New
England Confederation” of 1643 in Commager, op. cit.
^Benjamin F. Wright—especially in the important article “The Origins
of the Separation of Powers in America” in Economica, May, 1933—has
argued in a similar vein that “the framers of the first American constitu¬
tions were impressed by the separation of powers theory only because their
own experience . . . confirmed its wisdom”; and others have followed him.
Sixty or seventy years ago, it was almost a matter of course for American
scholarship to insist on an unbroken, autonomous continuity of American
history culminating in the Revolution and the establishment of the United
States. Since Bryce had related the American constitution-making to the
royal colonial charters by which the earliest English settlements were estab¬
lished, it had been current to explain the origin of a written constitution
as well as the unique emphasis on statutory legislation by the fact that
the colonies were subordinate political bodies, which derived from trading
companies and were capable of assuming powers only so far as delegated
by special grants, patents, and charters. (See William C. Morey’s ‘The
First State Constitutions” in Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science , September, 1893, vol. IV, and his essays on the Written
Constitution, quoted in Note 6.) Today this approach is much less common,
and the emphasis on European influences, British or French, is more widely
accepted. There are various reasons for this shift in emphasis in American
historical scholarship, among them the strong recent influence of the history
of ideas, which obviously directs its attention to intellectual precedent rather
than to political event, as well as the slightly older abandonment of iso¬
lationist attitudes. All this is quite interesting but of no great relevance
in our context. What I should like to underline here is that the importance
of royal or company charters seems to have been stressed at the expense
of the far more original and more interesting covenants and compacts which
the colonists made amongst themselves. For it seems to me that Merrill
Jensen—in his more recent article, op. cit.—is entirely right when he states:
“The central issue in seventeenth-century New England . . . was the source
of authority for the establishment of government. The English view was
that no government could exist in a colony without a grant of power from
the Crown. The opposite view, held by certain English dissenters in New
England, was that a group of people could create a valid government for
HANNAH ARENDT 599
John Dickinson, who once almost casually remarked, "Expe¬
rience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us,” 36 may
have been dimly aware of this unique but theoretically inarticulate
background of the American experiment. It has been said that
“America’s debt to the idea of the social contract is so huge as to
defy measurement,” 37 but the point of the matter is that the early
colonists, not the men of the Revolution, “put the idea into prac¬
tice,” and they certainly had no notion of any theory. On the con¬
trary, if Locke in a famous passage states, ‘That which begins and
actually constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent
of any number of freemen capable of majority, to unite and incor¬
porate into such society,” and then calls this act the “beginning to
any lawful government in the world,” it rather looks as though he
was more influenced by the facts and events in America, and
perhaps in a more decisive manner, than the founders were influ¬
enced by his Treatises of Civil Government* 8 The proof of the
matter—if proof in such matters can exist at all—lies in the
curious and, as it were, innocent way in which Locke construed
this “original compact,” in line with the current social-contract
theory, as a surrender of rights and powers to either the govern¬
ment or the community, that is, not at all as a “mutual” contract
but as an agreement in which an individual person resigns his
power to some higher authority and consents to be ruled in ex¬
change for a reasonable protection of his life and property. 39
Before we proceed, we must recall that in theory the seven¬
teenth century clearly distinguished between two kinds of “social
contract.” One was concluded between individual persons and sup¬
posedly gave birth to society; the other was concluded between a
people and its ruler and supposedly resulted in legitimate govem-
themselves by means of a covenant, compact, or constitution. The authors of
the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut oper¬
ated on this assumption. . . . It is the basic assumption of the Declaration
of Independence, a portion of which reads much like the words of Roger
Williams written 132 years earlier.”
^Quoted from Solberg, op. cit., p. xcii.
37 Thus Rossiter, op. cit., p. 132.
^The uniqueness of the Mayflower Compact was stressed time and again
in this period of American history. Thus, James Wilson, referring to it in a
lecture in 1790, reminds his audience that he is presenting “what, as to
the nations in the Transatlantic world, must be searched for in vain—an
original compact of a society, on its first arrival in this section of the
globe.” And the early histories of America are still quite explicitly insisting
on “a spectacle . . . which rarely occurs, of contemplating a society in the
first moment of its political existence,” as the Scottish historian Willi am
Robertson put it. See W. F. Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers ,
New York, 1956, pp. 57 and 64.
39 See especially op. cit.. Section 131.
600 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
ment. However, the decisive differences between these two kinds
(which have hardly more in common than a commonly shared
and misleading name) were early neglected because the theorists
themselves were primarily interested in finding a universal theory
covering all forms of public relationships, social as well as po¬
litical, and all kinds of obligations; hence, the two possible alter¬
natives of “social contract,” which, as we shall see, actually are
mutually exclusive, were seen, with more or less conceptual
clarity, as aspects of a single twofold contract. In theory, more¬
over, both contracts were fictions, the fictitious explanation of
existing relationships between the members of a community,
called society, or between this society and its government; and
while the history of the theoretical fictions can be traced back
deep into the past, there had been no instance, prior to the colonial
enterprise of the British people, when even a remote possibility of
testing their validity in actual fact had presented itself.
Schematically, the chief differences between these two kinds of
social contract may be enumerated as follows: The mutual con¬
tract by which people bind themselves together in order to form
a community is based on reciprocity and presupposes equality; its
actual content is a promise, and its result is indeed a “society” or
“cosociation” in the old Roman sense of societas, which means
alliance. Such an alliance gathers together the isolated strength
of the allied partners and binds them into a new power structure
by virtue of “free and sincere promises.” 40 In the so-called social
contract between a given society and its ruler, on the other hand,
we deal with a fictitious, aboriginal act on the side of each mem¬
ber, by virtue of which he gives up his isolated strength and
power to constitute a government; far from gaining a new power,
and possibly more than he had before, he resigns his power such
as it is, and far from binding himself through promises, he merely
expresses his “consent” to be ruled by the government, whose
power consists of the sum total of forces which all individual per¬
sons have channeled into it and which are monopolized by the
government for the alleged benefit of all subjects. As fax as the
individual person is concerned, it is obvious that he gains as
much power by the system of mutual promises as he loses by his
consent to a monopoly of power in the ruler. Conversely, those
who “covenant and combine themselves together” lose, by virtue
of reciprocation, their isolation, while in the other instance it is
precisely their isolation which is safeguarded and protected.
^See the Cambridge Agreement of 1629 in Commager, op. cit.
HANNAH AEENDT 6oi
Whereas the act of consent, accomplished by each individual
person in his isolation, stands indeed only "in the Presence of
God,” the act of mutual promise is by definition enacted "in the
presence of one another”; it is in principle independent of re¬
ligious sanction. Moreover, a body politic which is the result of
covenant and "combination” becomes the very source of power
for each individual person who outside the constituted political
realm remains impotent; the government which, on the contrary,
is the result of consent acquires a monopoly of power so that
the governed are politically impotent so long as they do not decide
to recover their original power in order to change the government
and entrust another ruler with their power.
In other words, the mutual contract where power is constituted
by means of promise contains in nuce both the republican prin¬
ciple, according to which power resides in the people, and where
a "mutual subjection” makes of rulership an absurdity—"if the
people be governors, who shall be governed?” 41 —and the federal
principle, the principle of "a Commonwealth for increase” (as
Harrington called his utopian Oceana), according to which con¬
stituted political bodies can combine and enter into lasting alli¬
ances without losing their identity. It is equally obvious that the
social contract which demands the resignation of power to the
government and the consent to its rule contains in nuce both the
principle of absolute rulership, of an absolute monopoly of power
"to overawe them all” (Hobbes) (which, incidentally, is liable to
be construed in the image of divine power, since only God is omni¬
potent), and the national principle according to which there must
be one representative of the nation as a whole, and where the
government is understood to incorporate the will of all nationals.
41 ln these words, John Cotton, Puritan minister and “The Patriarch of
New England” in the first half of the seventeenth century, raised his argu¬
ment against democracy, a government not fit “either for church or com¬
monwealth.” Here and in the following, I try to avoid as much as possible
a discussion of the relationship between Puritanism and American political
institutions. I believe in the validity of Clinton Rossiter’s distinction “be¬
tween Puritans and Puritanism, between the magnificent autocrats of Bos¬
ton and Salem and their inherently revolutionary way of life and thought”
(op. cii., p. 91), the latter consisting in their conviction that even in
monarchies God “referreth the sovereignty to himselfe” and their being
“obsessed with the covenant or contract.” But the difficulty is that these
two tenets are somehow incompatible, the notion of covenant presupposes
no-sovereignty and no-rulership, whereas the belief that God retains his
sovereignty and refuses to delegate it to any earthly power “setteth up
Theocracy . . . as the best form of government,” as John Cotton rightly
concluded. And the point of the matter is that these strictly religious influ¬
ences and movements, including the Great Awakening, had no influence
whatsoever on what the men of the Revolution did or thought.
602 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
“In the beginning,” Locke once remarked, "all the world was
America.” For all practical purposes, America should have pre¬
sented to the social-contract theories that beginning of society and
government which they had assumed to be the fictitious condition
without which the existing political realities could be neither
explained nor justified. And the very fact that the sudden rise and
great variety of social-contract theories during the early centuries
of the modem age were preceded and accompanied by these earli¬
est compacts, combinations, cosociations, and confederations in
colonial America would indeed be very suggestive, if it were not
for the undeniable other fact that these theories in the Old World
proceeded without ever mentioning the actual realities in the New
World. Nor are we entitled to assert that the colonists, departing
from the Old World, took with them the wisdom of new theories,
eager, as it were, for a new land in which to test them out and to
apply them to a novel form of community. This eagerness for ex¬
perimentation, and the concomitant conviction of absolute novelty,
of a novus ordo saeclorum, was conspicuously absent from the
minds of the colonists, as it was conspicuously present in the
minds of those men who one hundred and fifty years later were
to make the Revolution. If there was any theoretical influence that
contributed to the compacts and agreements in early American
history, it was, of course, the Puritans’ reliance on the Old Testa¬
ment, and especially their rediscovery of the concept of the cove¬
nant of Israel, which indeed became for them an ‘"instrument to
explain almost every relation of man to man and man to God.”
But while it may be true that "the Puritan theory of the origin of
the church in the consent of the believers led directly to the pop¬
ular theory of the origin of government in the consent of the
governed,” 42 this could not have led to the other much less current
theory of the origin of a “civil body politic” in the mutual promise
and binding of its constituents. For the Biblical covenant as the
Puritans understood it was a compact between God and Israel by
virtue of which God gave the law and Israel consented to keep it,
and while this covenant implied government by consent, it im¬
plied by no means a political body in which rulers and ruled
would be equal, that is, where actually the whole principle of
rulership no longer applied. 43
42 Rossiter, op. citloc. cit.
•^A magnificent example of the Puritan notion of covenant is contained
in a sermon by John Winthrop, written aboard the Arbella on the way to
America: “Thus stands the cause between God and us, we are entered into
Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a Commission, the
HANNAH ARENDT 603
Once we turn from these theories and speculations about in¬
fluences to the documents themselves and their simple, uncluttered,
and often awkward language, we see immediately that it is an
event rather than a theory or a tradition we are confronted with,
an event of the greatest magnitude and the greatest import for
the future, enacted on the spur of time and circumstances, and
yet thought out and considered with the greatest care and circum¬
spection. What prompted the colonists "solemnly and mutually in
the Presence of God and one another, [to] covenant and combine
ourselves together into a civil Body Politick . . . ; and by virtue
hereof [to] enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws,
Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as
shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good
of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and
Obedience” (as the Mayflower Compact has it), were the "difficul¬
ties and discouragements which in all probabilities must be forecast
upon the execution of this business.” Clearly the colonists, even
before embarking, had rightly and thoroughly considered "that
this whole adventure growes upon the joint confidence we have in
each others fidelity and resolution herein, so as no man of us
would have adventured it without assurance of the rest.” Nothing
but the simple and obvious insight into the elementary structure
of joint enterprise as such, the need "for the better encouragement
of ourselves and others that shall joyne with us in this action,”
caused these men to become obsessed with the notion of compact
and prompted them again and again "to promise and bind” them¬
selves to one another. 44 No theory, theological or political or philo¬
sophical, but their own decision to leave the Old World behind
and to venture forth into an enterprise entirely of their own led
into a sequence of acts and occurrences in which they would have
perished, had they not turned their minds to the matter long and
intensely enough to discover, almost by inadvertence, the ele¬
mentary grammar of political action and its more complicated
syntax, whose rules determine the rise and fall of human power.
Neither grammar nor syntax was something altogether new in the
Lord hath given us leave to draw our own Articles, we have professed to
enterprise these actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon be¬
sought him of favor and blessing: Now if the Lord shall please to hear us,
and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this
Covenant and sealed our Commission” (quoted from Perry Miller, The New
England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1954, p. 477).
44 Thus in the Cambridge Agreement of 1629, drafted by some of die lead¬
ing members of the Massachusetts Bay Company before they embarked for
America. Commager, op. cit.
604 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
history of Western civilization; but to find experiences of equal
import in the political realm and to read a language of equal
authenticity and originality—namely, so incredibly free of con¬
ventional idioms and set formulas—in the huge arsenal of his¬
torical documents, one might have to go back into a very distant
past indeed, a past, at any rate, of which the settlers were totally
ignorant. What they discovered, to be sure, was no theory of social
contract in either of its two forms, but rather the few elementary
truths on which this theory rests.
For our purpose in general, and our attempt to determine with
some measure of certainty the essential character of the revolu¬
tionary spirit in particular, it may be worth while to pause here
long enough to translate, however tentatively, the gist of these
pre-revolutionary and even pre-colonial experiences into the less
direct but more articulate language of political thought. We then
may say that the specifically American experience had taught the
men of the Revolution that action, though it may be started in
isolation and decided upon by single individuals for very different
motives, can be accomplished only by some joint effort in which
the motivation of single individuals—for instance, whether or not
they are an “undesirable lot”—no longer counts, so that homo¬
geneity of past and origin, the decisive principle of the nation¬
state, is not required. The joint effort equalizes very effectively
the differences in origin as well as in quality. Here, moreover, we
may find the root of the surprising so-called realism of the Found¬
ing Fathers with respect to human nature. They could afford to
ignore the French revolutionary proposition that man is good out¬
side society, in some fictitious original state, which, after all, was
the proposition of the Age of Enlightenment. They could afford to
be realistic and even pessimistic in this matter because they knew
that whatever men might be in their singularity, they could bind
themselves into a community which, even though it was composed
of “sinners,” need not necessarily reflect this “sinful” side of
human nature. Hence, the same social state which to their French
colleagues had become the root of all human evil was to them the
only reasonable hope for a salvation from evil and wickedness at
which men might arrive even in this world and even by them¬
selves, without any divine assistance. Here, incidentally, we may
also see the authentic source of the much misunderstood Amer-
ican version of the then current belief in the perfectibility of man.
Before American common philosophy fell prey to Rousseauan
notions in these matters—and this did not happen prior to the
nineteenth century—American faith was not at all based on a
HANNAH ARENDT 605
semi-religious trust in human nature but, on the contrary, on the
possibility of checking human nature in its singularity by virtue
of common bonds and mutual promises. The hope for man in his
singularity lay in the fact that not man but men inhabit the earth
and form a world between them. It is human worldliness that will
save men from the pitfalls of human nature. And the strongest
argument, therefore, John Adams could muster against a body
politic dominated by a single assembly was that it was "liable to
all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual.” 45
Closely connected with this is an insight into the nature of
human power. In distinction to strength, which is the gift and the
possession of every man in his isolation against all other men,
power comes into being only if and when men join themselves
together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for
whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. Hence,
binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means
by which power is kept in existence; where and when men suc¬
ceed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them
during the source of any particular act or deed, they are already
in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly
structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action.
There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the
human faculty of making and keeping promises. Just as promises
and agreements deal with the future and provide stability in the
ocean of future uncertainty where the unpredictable may break in
from all sides, so the constituting, founding, and world-building
capacities of man concern always not so much ourselves and our
own time on earth as our ""successor,” and ""posterities.” The gram¬
mar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands
a plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the
only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between
space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of
foundation by virtue of the making and the keeping of promises,
which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human
faculty.
In other words, what had happened in colonial America prior
to the Revolution (and what had happened in no other part of the
world, neither in the old countries nor in the new colonies) was,
theoretically speaking, that action had led to the formation of
power and that power was kept in existence by the then newly
discovered means of promise and covenant. The force of this
4S See Thoughts on Government (1776), Works , Boston, 1851, IV, 195.
606 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
power, engendered by action and kept by promises, came to the
fore when, to the great surprise of all the great powers, the
colonies, namely, the townships and provinces, the counties and
cities, their numerous differences amongst themselves notwith¬
standing, won the war against England. But this victory was a
surprise only for the Old World; the colonists themselves, with a
hundred and fifty years of covenant-making behind them, rising
out of a country which was articulated from top to bottom—from
provinces or states down to cities and districts, townships, villages,
and counties—into duly constituted bodies, each a commonwealth
of its own, with representatives "freely chosen by the consent of
loving friends and neighbors,” 46 each, moreover, designed "for
increase” as it rested on the mutual promises of those who were
"cohabiting” and who, when they "conioyned [them] selves to be
as one Publike State or Commonwealth,” had planned not only for
their "successors” but even for "such as shall be adioyned to [them]
att any tyme hereafter,” 47 —the men who out of the uninterrupted
strength of this tradition "hid a final adieu to Britain” knew their
chances from the beginning; they knew of the enormous power
potential that arises when men "mutually pledge to each other
[their] lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor.” 48
^This is from the Plantation agreement at Providence, which founded
the town of Providence in 1640 (Commager, op. cii.). It is of special interest
as the principle of representation is found here for the first time, and also
because those who were “so betrusted” agreed “after many Considerations
and Consultations of our owne State and also of States abroad in way
of government” that no form of government would be so “suitable to their
Condition as government by way of Arbitration.”
47 Thus in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639 (Commager,
op. cii.), which Bryce (American Commonwealth , vol. I, p. 414, note) has
called “the oldest truly political constitution in America.”
4S The “final adieu to Britain” occurs in the Instructions from the Town
of Malden, Massachusetts, for a Declaration of Independence, May 27, 1776
(Commager,^ op. cii.). The fierce language of these instructions, the town
renouncing “with disdain our connexion with a kingdom of slaves,” shows
how right Tocqueville was when he traced the origin of the American
Revolution to the spirit of the townships. Interesting for the popular
strength of republican sentiment throughout the states is also Jefferson's
testimony in The Anas , February 4, 1818 (The Complete Jefferson , Saul
Padover, ed. New York, 1943, p. 1206 ff.); it shows very convincingly that if
“the contests of that day were contests of principle between the advocates
of republican and those of kingly government,” it was the republican opin¬
ions of the people that eventually settled the difference of opinion among
the statesmen. How strong republican sentiments were even before the
Revolution because of this unique American experience is evident in John
Adams' early writings. In a series of papers written in 1774 for the Boston
Gazette , he wrote: “The first planters of Plymouth were 'our ancestors' in
the strictest sense. They had no charter or patent for the land they took
possession of; and derived no authority from the English parliament or
crown to set up their government. They purchased land of the Indians, and
HANNAH ARENDT 607
This was the experience that guided the men of the Revolution;
it had taught not only them but the people who had delegated
and “so betrusted” them, how to establish and found public bodies,
and as such it was without parallel in any other part of the world.
The same, however, is by no means true of their reason, or rather
reasoning, of which Dickinson rightly feared that it might mislead
them. Their reason, indeed, both in style and content was formed
by the Age of Enlightenment as it had spread to both sides of the
Adantic; they argued in the same terms as their French or English
colleagues, and even their disagreements were by and large still
discussed within the framework of commonly shared references
and concepts. Thus, Jefferson could speak of the consent by the
people from which governments “derive their just powers” in the
same Declaration which he closes on the principle of mutual
pledges, and neither he nor anybody else became aware of the
simple and elementary difference between the two types of social-
contract theory. This lack of conceptual clarity and precision with
respect to existing realities and experiences has been the curse of
Western history ever since, in the aftermath of the Periclean Age,
the men of action and the men of thought parted company and
thinking began to emancipate itself altogether from reality, and
especially from political factuality and experience. The great hope
of the modem age and the modem age’s revolutions has been,
from the beginning, that this rift might be healed; one of the
reasons why this hope thus far has not been fulfilled, why, in the
words of Tocqueville, not even the New World could bring forth
a new political science, lies in the enormous strength and resili¬
ency of our tradition of thought, which has withstood all the re¬
versals and transformation of values through which the thinkers
of the nineteenth century tried to undermine and to destroy it.
However that may be, the fact of the matter, as it relates to
the American Revolution, was that experience had taught the
colonists that royal and company charters confirmed and legalized
rather than established and founded their “commonwealth,” that
they were “subject to the laws which they adopted at their first
settlement, and to such others as have been since made by their
respective Legislatures,” and that such liberties were “confirmed
by the political constitutions they have respectively assumed, and
set up a government of their own, on the simple principle of nature; . . .
and [they] continued to exercise all the powers of government, legislative,
executive, and judicial, upon the plain ground of an original contract
among independent individuals” (My italics.) See Novanglus } Works , vol.
IV, p. 110.
6 o8 REINTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
also by several charters of compact from the Crown.” 49 It is true,
"the colonial theorists wrote much about the Birtish constitution,
the rights of Englishmen, and even of the laws of nature, but they
accepted the British assumption that colonial governments derived
from British charters and commissions.” 50 Yet the essential point
even in these theories was the curious interpretation, or rather
misinterpretation, of the British constitution as a fundamental law
which could limit the legislative powers of Parliament. This,
clearly, meant understanding the British constitution in the light
of American compacts and agreements, which indeed were such
"fundamental Law,” such "fixed” authority, the "bounds” of which
even the supreme legislature might not "overlap . . . without de¬
stroying its own foundation.” It was precisely because the Amer¬
icans so firmly believed in their own compacts and agreements
that they would appeal to a British constitution and their "consti¬
tutional Right,” "exclusive of any Consideration of Charter Rights”;
whereby it is even relatively unimportant that they, following the
fashion of the time, asserted this to be an "unalterable Right, in
nature,” since, to them at least, this right had become law only
because they thought it to be "ungrafted into the British Constitu¬
tion, as a fundamental Law.” 51
And again, experience had taught the colonists enough about
the nature of human power to conclude from the by no means
intolerable abuses of power by a particular king that kingship as
such is a form of government fit for slaves, and that "an American
republic . . . is the only government which we wish to see estab¬
lished; for we can never be willingly subject to any other Kin g
than he who, being possessed of infinite wisdom, goodness and
rectitude, is alone fit to possess unlimited power”; 52 but the colo-
4 ®This is from a Resolution of Freeholders of Albemarle County, Virginia,
July 26, 1774, which was drafted by Jefferson. The royal charters axe men¬
tioned almost as an afterthought, and the curious term “charter of com¬
pact, which reads like a contradiction in terms, shows clearly that it was
compact, and not charter, that Jefferson had in min d (Commager, op. cit .).
And this insistence on compact at the expense of royal or company charters
is by no means a consequence of revolution. Almost ten years before the
Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Fran klin argued “that parliament
was so far from having a hand in the work of original settlement that it
actually took no kind of notice of them, till many years after they were
established” (Craven, op. cit., p. 44).
^Merrill Jensen, op. cit.
^This is from the Massachusetts Circular Letter, protesting the Towns-
hend Acts of February 11, 1768, drafted by Samuel Adams. According to
Commager, these addresses to the British Ministry present “one of the
earliest formulations of the doctrine of fundamental law in the British
constitution.”
52 From the Instructions of the Town of Malden, as quoted in note 48.
HANNAH ARENDT 609
nial theorists were still debating at length the advantages and dis¬
advantages of the various forms of government—as though there
were any choice in this matter. Finally, it was experience—"the
unified wisdom of North America . . . collected in a general con¬
gress” 53 —rather than theory or learning, that taught the men of
the Revolution the real meaning of the Roman potestas in populo,
that power resides in the people. They knew that the principle of
potestas in populo is capable of inspiring a form of government
only if one adds, as the Romans did, auctoritas in senatu, au¬
thority resides in the senate, so that government itself consists of
both power and authority, or, as the Romans had it, senatus
populusque Romanus. What the royal charters and the loyal at¬
tachment of the colonies to king and Parliament in England had
done for the people in America was to provide their power with
the additional weight of authority; so that the chief problem of
the American Revolution, once this source of authority had been
severed from the colonial body politic in the New World, turned
out to be the establishment and foundation not of power but
of authority.
“As the Virginia Instructions to the Continental Congress of August 1,
1774, put it (Commager, op. cit.).
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Most of the important writings on the American Revolution have
been discussed at some length in the introductory essay. No considera¬
tion was given in that essay, however, to biographies or works on
either the military or diplomatic aspects of the Revolution. Wesley
Frank Craven, “The Revolutionary Era,” in John Higham, ed.. The
Reinterpretation of American History (London, 1962), comments on
some of the more important of the recent biographical studies; Don
Higginbotham, “American Historians and the Military History of
the American Revolution,” American Historical Review, LXXX (1964),
18-34 is an excellent analysis of recent literature on the war itself;
and Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution
(New York, 1935) and Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers (New
York, 1965) are the standard works on Revolutionary diplomacy.
Other treatments of the historiography of the Revolution not men¬
tioned in the introductory essay are Page Smith, ‘David Ramsay and
the Causes of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly ,
3rd ser., XVII (1960), 51-77, and Peter Marshall, “Radicals, Conserva¬
tives and the American Revolution,” Past and Present, XXIII (1962),
44-56.
General collections of primary sources, all of which are available
in paper editions, are Samuel Eliot Morison, ed.. Sources and Docu¬
ments Illustrating the American Revolution 1764-1788 and the Forma¬
tion of the American Constitution (Oxford, 1923); Max Beloff, ed.,
The Debate over the American Revolution, 1761-1783 (London, 1949);
Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation, 1763-1789 (New York, 1967);
and John Braeman, ed.. The Road to Independence: A Documentary
History of the Causes of the American Revolution: 1763-1776 (New
York, 1963).
For a continuous and reasonably detailed narrative of the entire
Revolutionary era, the reader will do best to read the following three
volumes in sequence: John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolu¬
tion (Boston, 1943); John Richard Alden, The American Revolution
1775-1783 (New York, 1954); and Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin,
The Confederation and the Constitution 1783—1789 (New York, 1905).
The best brief history is by Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the
Republic 1763-89 (Chicago, 1956).
6ii
INDEX
Abbott, Henry, 540
Adair, Douglass, 47, 59, 70, 397
Adams, Abigail, 244-245
Adams, John, 74, 104, 137, 140, 154,
182,
189,
194,
201-204,
205,
206,
211 ,
217,
218, 222,
223,
224,
230-231,
233, 235,
242,
246,
267,
302,
346-353,
361,
397-398,
402-406, 407,
409-
410,
411,
415,
442, 456,
491,
502,
509,
570,
573, 578,
579,
581,
585, 592, 605
Adams, John Quincy, 420
Adams, Samuel, 11, 104, 239, 243,
246, 248-249, 347, 382, 383
Adams, Randolph G., 13-14, 152
Administration of Justice Act, 222
Agents and Merchants: British Co¬
lonial Policy and the Origins of
the American Revolution , 1763—
1775 , (Sosin), 49
Albany Plan, 316
American Board of Customs Com¬
missioners, 213, 248-249
American Revolution Considered as
a Social Movement , The (Jame¬
son), 13, 281
American States During and After
the Revolution , The (Nevins),
13
American Tory , The (Nelson), 46
American Vine , The (Duche), 258
Andrews, Charles M., 5-6, 7, 87, 88
Andros, Edmund, 95, 255
Anglicanism, see Church, Anglican
Annapolis Convention, 389, 390, 391
Antifederalists, 60-62, 66, 68-69, 71-
72, 300, 365-378, 381, 382-384,
386, 391, 392, 393, 394, 444,
466, 504
ideologues among, 369-370, 578
objections to Constitution by, 528-
566
vested-interest groups among, 370-
378
See also Federalists
Antifederalists: Critics of the Consti¬
tution , 1781-1788 (Main), 61
Arendt, Hannah, 73-74, 568
Army, Continental, 382, 383, 384,
385, 387
Articles of Confederation , The (Jen¬
sen), 15
Ashley, John 113-114
Assembly, colonial Lower Houses of,
see Government, colonial local
Atherton, Joshua, 369
Atkinson, Roger, 338
Auchmuty, Robert, 197, 201, 203
Bacon, Francis, 488
Bagehot, Walter, 30
Bailyn, Bernard, 39—40, 44, 55-56,
58, 207
Baldwin, Ebenezer, 227—228, 456
Bancker, Gerard, 372
Bancroft, George, 3-4, 5, 8, 12, 17, 87
Barbados, 113, 114
Barker, Thomas, 91
Barre, Isaac, 167
Barrow, Thomas C., 20—21, 34
Bayard, John, 377
Beard, Charles A., 11—13, 14—15,
59-60, 61, 63, 67, 281, 293,
354-355, 356, 360, 379-381, 390,
526-529, 560-561, 565, 566
Beard, Mary, 14-15
Beccaria, Cesare, 282
Becker, Carl L., 9, 11, 12, 13-14,
28, 278, 280-281, 479
Beer, George L., 5, 6, 7, 8, 19
Belcher, Jonathan, 91, 96
613
hit
CARNEGIF
614 index
Benjamin Franklin and American
Foreign Policy (Stourzh), 39
Benson, Lee, 62—63, 64, 66
Bernard, Francis, 26, 91, 116, 164,
169, 190, 199, 200, 203, 217-
218, 220
Bill of Eights, 69, 395, 464, 468,
542-543, 559, 564, 585, 586-
588, 592
Birth of the Republic , 1763-89 , The
(Morgan), 37
Bishop, John, 377
Blackstone, Sir William, 198, 360
Bland, Richard, 105, 107, 171, 195
Blood worth, Timothy, 370, 539
Boone, Thomas, 91, 94, 95
Boorstin, Daniel J., 50-51, 437
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 340
Boston Massacre, 35, 205, 221, 223,
248, 256
Boston Port Act, 222, 256
Boston Tea Party, 35-36, 50, 222
Boston Tea Party , The (Labaree, B.),
35
Bowdoin, James, 221, 416, 420, 423
Brackenridge, Hugh H., 258-259
Braxton, Carter, 409
Brearley Committee on Postponed
Matters, 458-459
Brearley, David, 449, 452
Bridenbaugh, Carl, 23, 25, 34
Britain, colonial policy of, 22—23,
31-32, 35, 47-50, 93, 97-98, 99,
101-103, 104, 105-108, 137-140,
182, 187-188, 190-193, 210; see
also Government, colonial, ad¬
ministrative corruption in
republican government in, 571-*
572
tyranny toward colonies of, 4—5,
6-7, 19, 208-210, 234
See also Colonies, American,
British army in; Colonies,
American, British conspiracy
against; Commonwealth, the;
Courts, English; Empire, Brit¬
ish; George III, king of Eng¬
land; Government, colonial,
views of British in; Govern¬
ment, colonial local, imperial;
Mercantilism, British, and co¬
lonial policy; Parliament, Brit¬
ish; Taxes, Parliamentary
theory of
Britain's Commercial Interest (Pos-
tlethwayt), 119
British Colonial Policy , 1754-1765
(Beer), 5
British Empire Before the American
Revolution , The (Gipson), 7
Broughton, Thomas, 90
Brown, B. Katherine, 29
Brown, Robert E., 29, 30, 59, 355,
356, 512
Brown, Wallace, 45-46, 47
Brown, William, 377
Bryan, George, 370, 383, 547, 557-
558
Bryan, Samuel, 383, 384, 547, 557-
558
Buel, Richard, Jr., 30, 39, 110
Bull, William, 90, 94
Bull, William, the younger, 94
Burgh, James, 229, 283
Burgoyne, John, 260
Burke, Edmund, 226, 286, 315, 347,
557
Burnet, William, 94
Burrington, George, 91
Butler, Pierce, 400, 411, 461
Byrd, William, H, 288
Caldwell, David, 537, 540
Calhoun, John C., 460, 462
Calvinism, 43—44, 57—58.
See also Churches, noncon¬
formist; Revolution, Amer¬
ican, religious roots of
Canada, 118, 119; see also Nova
Scotia, colonial government of
Carrington, C. E., Ill
Carroll, Charles, 92
Cato's Letters (Trenchard and Gor¬
don), 283
Chalmers, George, 87, 190—191
Chalmers, James, 108
Channing, Edward, 87
Chauncy, Charles, 255
Child, Robert, 261
Church, Anglican, 571-572
in American colonies, 23, 36, 37,
209-210, 238, 252, 254, 255,
257-258, 265-267, 269, 284-285,
358
INDEX 615
Church ( Continued )
separation from state of, see Reli¬
gion, disestablishment of
Churches, Baptist, 254, 255, 284, 348,
352
Congregational, 209, 239, 348, 358
nonconformist, 23, 209, 210, 284,
571-572; political ideology of,
282-283, 571, 572
Presbyterian, 209, 239, 254, 255,
266, 272
See also Calvinism; Quakers
Clarke, George, 90
Class conflict in eighteenth-century
America, 8, 11, 15, 28, 29, 31,
51, 55, 60, 61-64, 281, 289, 294,
323-324, 343-344, 354-355, 528
See also Revolution, Amer¬
ican, radical elements of
Clinton, George, 91, 94, 95, 331,
371-374, 381-382, 383, 384, 385,
391, 394, 440, 444, 541, 548,
550, 556-557
Coercive Acts, 14, 205, 233, 241
Coke, Edmund, 183, 185
Colboum, H. Trevor, 40
Colonial Merchants and the Amer¬
ican Revolution , The (Schles-
inger), 10
Colonial Period of American History ,
The (Andrews), 88
Colonies, American, affects of Brit¬
ish mercantilism on, 78, 79—86,
111, 116-119
British army in, 33, 34, 35, 37, 85,
220 -221, 222, 223
British conspiracy against, 208-
214, 217-218, 219, 220-228,
231-232
constitutional issues in, 37, 39,
50-51, 54, 55, 97-104, 105-109,
120-121, 126, 165-169, 172,
174-175, 176, 180-181, 187, 189,
192, 194, 196, 215, 216, 225-
226, 240, 244—247, 573—575;
see also Revolution, American,
political aspects of; Taxes, co¬
lonial, levied by Parliament
immigration to, 79, 85, 232—235,
285
judicial issues in, 183-206, 214—
218; see also Courts, colonial
manufacturing in, 244-245
money policy of, 280, 281, 298, 385
political representation in, 285—
297, 324—338; see also Govern¬
ment, representation in
public religion in, 251-274
Northern, see individual colonies;
New England; North, the
slavery in, 80-82, 358, 361
Southern, see individual colonies;
South, the
See also Army, Continental;
Britain, colonial policy of;
Democracy, eighteenth-century
American; Ethic, Puntan;
Free enterprise, in colonial
America; Government, colo¬
nial local; History, colonial
American concepts of; Inde¬
pendence, colonial American
movement for; Liberty, colo¬
nial American concepts of;
Mercantilism, British, and co¬
lonial policy; money policy,
British; Taxes, colonial Amer¬
ican
Common Sense (Paine), 267, 304,
305, 319, 570-571
Confederation, 12, 14, 15, 16, 105,
273, 375, 381, 386-391, 405,
409, 411, 439, 444, 574, 598
agrarian interests and, 62—63, 64—
65
Articles of, 61, 63, 281, 316-317,
319, 356, 369, 379-380, 386-
387, 389, 391, 398, 407, 439,
441, 444, 445, 448, 450-451,
464, 519, 552, 577, 584
commercial interests and, 62r-63,
64-65, 388-389, 390, 407
economic aspects of, 11-13, 60-
62, 63-66, 68, 69, 70, 385, 387-
389, 390-391, 396, 407, 411,
417-419
electioneering in, 427, 433
fiscal disputes during, 60, 64—65,
69
formation of, 60—61, 64
ideological aspects of, 63, 67-72
political aspects of, 66-71, 386-
390, 393, 407, 576-577
representation in Continental Con-
6l6 INDEX
Confederation ( C ontinued )
gress in, 295; see also Congress,
Continental
slavery in, 460—462, 532
state government in, 388-389; see
also Constitutions, state; Massa¬
chusetts, state constitution of;
state legislature of; North Caro¬
lina, state constitution of; Penn¬
sylvania, state constitution of
Congress, Continental, 105, 107, 108,
205, 243, 244, 250 ff., 265, 267,
272, 316, 328-329, 356, 367,
369, 382 ff., 398, 441, 475 ff.
Congress, Federal, 64, 65, 357, 431,
467, 477, 483, 532, 534, 541 ff.,
554, 563 ff.
See also Government, Federal;
House of Representatives;
Senate
Connecticut, 27, 89, 153, 156 ff:., 171,
176, 223, 227, 285, 328, 336,
338, 342, 347, 368 f., 378, 388,
440, 444, 455, 597
See also New England
Connecticut Compromise, 457—458
Considerations on the Propriety of
imposing Taxes in the British
Colonies (Dulany), 171, 174
Constitution, as act of people, 595—
596
as limitation of power, 581 ff., 592
definition of, 583—584, 588—589
imposed on people, 583 ff.
Constitution, Federal, 3, 12 ff., 55 ff.,
59-72, 73 f., 268, 273, 279, 281,
292 f., 296 ff., 305, 315 ff., 346,
354-358, 365 ff., 373, 376, 378-
380, 382, 386, 398-400, 431,
436, 438, 446-447, 451, 454,
466-469, 504, 506-507, 527, 581,
594-595
amendments to, 511—512
as model, 584, 586
as revolutionary document, 579-
584, 586, 593-594
criticisms of, 537-566
defence of, 543-544
economic determinism and, see
Beard, Charles A.
ideological nature of, 397-407,
411—412, 470, 475, 478, 480-485,
496, 498, 507 f., 509-515, 527-
529
limitations on state legislatures,
in, 554-556, 560
political nature of, 411-416, 533
ratification of, 393-395, 439-441,
445, 460-466, 525, 536-537, 584
religious objections to, 540-541
See also Antifederalists; Con¬
federation; Federalist , The;
Federalists; Government, re¬
publican
Constitutional Convention, 12, 60,
61, 67, 70, 296, 317, 340-343,
355-357, 369 f., 374, 379-380,
389-394, 398-400, 405, 407,
408-412, 417, 436 ff., 440-441,
443-446, 448-462, 467, 475,
481-482, 491-492, 525, 533,
577-578, 595
democratic politics at, 438-439,
442, 445-456, 467-469
See also History, eighteenth-
century political use of
Constitutional Courant, The , 188-189
Constitutionalist Party, 377
Constitutions, state, 54-55, 69, 146,
342-354, 588, 595
See also Massachusetts, state
constitution of; North Caro¬
lina, state constitution of;
Pennsylvania, state constitu¬
tion of
Convention, Philadelphia, see Consti¬
tutional Convention
Conway, Henry S., 193
Cooke, Elisha, Jr., 90
Cooke, Samuel, 256
Coombe, Thomas, 257, 266
Cooper, Samuel, 267-268
Copley, Lionel, 95
Com Laws, 77
Cornbury, Edward H., 95
Cotton, John, 261
Courts, colonial admiralty, 183-206
colonial common-law, 183 ff., 217
colonial vice-admiralty, 34-35, 37,
188, 193 ff., 217
English, 185, 192-193
Coxe, William, 370
Cresap, Thomas, 326
Critical Period, The (Fiske) 3
Croghan, George, 247-248
Growl, Philip A., 51
Culpeper, Thomas, 95
Cushing, William, 425, 428
Dartmouth, William, 2nd Earl of, 49
Davidson Philip, 14
Declaration of Independence, 18, 16,
35, 46, 52, 54, 57, 73, 101, 108,
150, 152, 154, 225, 256, 258,
266, 293, 302, 306, 310, 312 ff.,
316 ff., 341, 350, 380, 504,
506 ff., 517, 573, 579, 588, 595,
606
Declaration of Independence , The
(Becker), 13
“Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen,” 587—588
Declaratory Act, 107 f., 167 ff., 179 f.
Defense of the Constitutions of the
United States (Adams), 398,
402-404, 409, 456-157, 491
Defense of the New England Char¬
ters . . . (Dummer), 185, 186
Deism, 273
Delafaye, Charles, 102
Delaware, 51, 164, 336, 369
Democracy, early nineteenth-century
American, 58-59, 146, 359; see
also Jefferson, Thomas
eighteenth-century American, 51—
59, 60, 62, 67-70, 126-146, 181-
182, 206, 246, 285, 288, 296-
301, 322-324, 328, 335-338,
345, 359-360, 381-382, 405,
408 ff., 412-416, 417, 431, 478-
479, 507-516, 519, 520-524,
528-529, 533 f., 549, 556-559,
562-563, 566
nature of, 30, 135, 146, 181, 322-
323, 402—403, 494-497, 506-507
See also Freedom; Govern¬
ment, role of the people in;
Liberty; Man, nature of; Pop¬
ulism
Denny, William, 95
Descartes, Rene, 471
D iam ond, Martin, 69—70, 71, 504
Dickerson, Oliver M., 19—21, 34, 197,
248
Dickinson, John, 104, 162, 188, 191,
INDEX 617
212, 223, 267, 310, 370, 399-
400, 439, 449, 580, 599, 607
Dinwiddie, Robert, 91, 94 f.
Discourse on the good News from
a far Country , A (Chauncy),
355
Discourse on the Love of Country , A
(Williams, S.), 270
Disquisition on Government (Cal¬
houn), 462
Dissenters, see Churches, noncon¬
formist
Dissertation on .. . the Whigs and
Tories (Rapin), 225
Dobbs, Arthur, 91, 95
Donoughue, Bernard, 49-50
Douglass, Elisha, 52 f., 421
Downer, Silas, 243
Drayton, William H., 323
Duane, James, 383, 386, 394
Duche, Jacob, 257 f., 266
Dudley, Joseph, 90
Duffield, George, 272-273
Dulany, Daniel, 92, 104, 169, 171 ff.,
177, 188, 191
Dummer, Jeremiah, 185 f.
Dunk, George, Earl of Halifax, 31,
102 f., 105
Dyer, John, 119
East India Company, 36, 230
Economic Interpretation of the Con¬
stitution, An (Beard), 11—12,
281, 293, 354-355, 527, 560
Education, public, 347
Edwards, Jonathan, 43
Eighteenth-Century Commonwealth-
man, The (Robbins), 282
Electoral college, 458-460, 513
Elkins, Stanley, 68-69, 364, 441
Ellis, Henry, 95
Ellsworth, Oliver, 455
Empire, British, 22, 26-27
American ideology of, 113—122,
165, 182, 189-190, 195 f., 204 f.,
303 f., 570; see also Colonies,
American, constitutional issues
in; Government, colonial local,
ideology of
English ideology of, 112, 114 ff.,
189-190
See also Mercantilism, British
6l8 INDEX
Empire (Koebner), 26
England, see Britain
English Navigation Laws , The (Har¬
per), 6-7
Enlightenment, the, 56, 258, 281,
500, 604, 607
liberal ideology of, 277, 279, 283,
285, 287, 290
Essay on Man (Pope) 472-474
Essays , Moral , Political , and Literary
(Hume), 492-503
Essays To Do Good (Mather), 257
Ethic, Puritan, 40-45, 57-59, 235 f.,
238-240, 257 f., 265, 268-274
austerity in, 241 ff., 251, 270
attitude towards commerce in, 237,
240, 243-245, 248-250
attitude towards wealth in, 236-
238, 240, 241-243, 266
attitude towards work in, 236-238,
240, 244-245, 249-251, 267
individual vocation in, 236-238,
240, 247
view of history in, 239
See also Colonies, American,
public religion in: Morality,
colonial American concepts of
Evangelism, 43-44
See also Jeremiad, the
Fable of the Bees , The (Mandeville),
472
Farmer's Letters (Dickinson), 212
Farrand, Max, 398
Fauquier, Francis, 93, 97
Federalists, 60-62, 68—69, 71 f.,
365 ff., 374, 381 ff., 391, 393 f.,
421, 431, 433 f., 454, 504, 528,
532, 537, 544 f., 558 ff.
Federalist , The, 292, 307, 316 f., 370,
4131, 446 ff., 4571, 468, 475,
480 ff., 506 ff., 512, 514 ff.,
524 ff., 5361, 552, 554, 556,
558
paper No. X, 475 ff., 492, 496 ff.,
510, 518, 520, 578
Ferguson, Adam, 489
Findley, William, 377
Fink, Z. S., 38
Fiske, John, 3, 12, 15
Fitch, John, 157, 171
France, 81, 83, 85, 116 ff., 585
American colonies of, 1181, 121
See also French Convention;
Revolution, French
Franklin, Benjamin, 104, 114 ff.,
119-122, 175 ff., 204 f., 212,
226, 239, 250, 257, 266, 296,
400, 410, 455 f., 463, 557, 570,
573
Freedom, as natural drive, 3
established by revolution, 579-581,
582, 594
preserved by constitution, 585 f.,
587, 589, 594, 607 f.
See also God, Providence of;
Liberty, colonial American
concepts of
French and Indian War, 182, 187
See also Seven Years’ War
French Convention, 345
Freneau, Philip, 267
Ferguson, James, 64 f.
Free enterprise, British, 77, 112
in colonial America, 78 ff.
Gadsden, Christopher, 104 f.
Gale, Benjamin, 194, 196
Galloway, Thomas, 46, 250, 341, 554
Garth, Charles, 167, 178 f.
Genius of American Politics , The
(Boorstin), 50
George III, king of England, 3, 24,
46 f., 50, 225, 258, 394, 306
Georgia, 27, 46, 92 f., 95, 103, 112,
254 f., 258, 284, 336 f., 343,
368 f., 440
Germain, George, 49
Gerry, Elbridge, 369, 383 f., 463
Gipson, Lawrence H., 7 f., 247
Gladstone, William E., 583
Glen, James, 90
God, as author of human equality,
573
as creator, 470 f., 473
covenant with, 254 ff., 259, 261 ff.,
267 f., 271 ff., 574
Providence of, 4, 41, 232 f., 242,
263, 266, 270 ff.
Puritan conceptions of, 236 ff.,
241, 251 f., 254 f., 260 f.; see
also Ethic, Puritan
Gooch, William, 91, 94
Gordon, Thomas, 283
INDEX 619
Gordon, William, 256, 263
Government, aim of, 347, 472—474,
477, 480, 509, 516-519, 520, 537
checks and balances in, 546 ff.,
560, 565 f., 575
colonial, administrative corruption
in, 211-214, 217 f., 226 ff., 248-
250; imperial, 86, 93, 102 f.,
283; views of British of, 246 ff.,
269; see also Britain, colonial
policy of
colonial local, 22 f., 28, 36, 155—
165, 166 f., 303, 530, 594 f., de¬
velopment of, 86—95, 102-104,
304, 328-338, 607 f.; ideology
of, 95-102, 104, 111, 115, 126-
146, 153-155, 304 f., 311 f., 322-
324, 328 f., 339-361, 596 f., see
also Empire, British, American
ideology of
constitutional, 581-585; see also
Government, republican
contract theory of, 126-130, 135,
339, 341, 348, 574 f,, 599-602,
604, 607
eighteenth-century theories of,
402-412, 476-479, 480-486,
487 f., 491, 492-503, 516-524,
552, 573-578
executive power in, 344 f., 347,
351 f., 357 f., 403, 414, 447,
458-460, 466, 495, 546-548
factions in, 498-502, 510 f., 520—
524, 536, 552, 559 f., 563
federal, 105, 315 ff., 354-358, 366-
369, 398, 502, 591 f., 595, 597 f.,
601; see also Congress, Federal;
House of Representatives; Pres¬
idency; Senate
law as principle of order in, 54,
133 f., 140, 472, 590 f., 594, 596;
see also law
legislative power in, 341, 344 ff.,
351 f., 357, 403, 447-449, 457,
468, 478, 484, 495, 514 f., 546-
548
minority rights in, 308—310, 313 f.,
352 f., 508, 521
Puritan ideology of, 261 f., 269—
271, 602; see also Ethic, Puritan
representation in, 133, 134-147,
165-167, 174 f., 245 f., 307, 315,
324-338, 339, 341, 344, 403,
454_456, 533-539, 544, 558,
561-566, 581 f.
republican, 70 ff., 128-130, 302 ff.,
312, 317 f., 347, 369 f., 381 f.,
396, 405-412, 417 f., 470, 479 f.,
491 f., 493-499, 502, 506-515,
517-520, 521, 528 ff., 533, 535,
546, 551, 558 f., 561-566, 570-
572, 575, 577-588, 591, 593, 598,
601, 608
role of judiciary in, 462 f.
role of the people in, 307, 311 f.,
322-324, 328, 337 f., 339-342,
347, 349 f., 353 f., 356 ff., 556-
559, 561-563, 565, 574-576; see
also Democracy, eighteenth-cen¬
tury American
separation of powers in, 589-594
theories of "mixed,” 408-416, 502,
589
tyranny in, 581, 590, 593
use of franchise in, 141—144, 280,
285 f., 289, 344-351, 353, 356 f.,
359, 470, 476, 478, 496, 498,
502, 512 f., 534-536, 544, 558,
563 f., 572
See also Britain, colonial pol¬
icy of; Colonies, American,
constitutional issues in; His¬
tory, eighteenth-century politi¬
cal use of; Nova Scotia, colo¬
nial local government of; Poli¬
tics, theories of power in;
Revolution, American, politi¬
cal aspects of
Granville, John Carteret, Earl of, 31
Grayson, William, 415, 540, 548 f.,
554, 560
Greene, Jack P., 22, 34, 37
Greene, Nathanael, 384, 387
Greene, William, 186
Grenville, George, 32 f., 153, 173 ff.,
177, 192
Grenville program, 9, 23
Hamilton, Alexander, 74, 231, 296,
298, 305, 312 f., 317, 370, 381,
383 ff., 389 f., 394, 400, 406 f.,
408-411, 431, 437 f., 440, 444 f.,
447, 453 f., 464, 466, 468, 491,
502, 553, 570, 578, 593
620 INDEX
Hamilton Plan, 453 f.
Hancock, John, 20, 199-203, 204 f.,
374
Hanna, John, 377
Harper, Lawrence A., 6 f., 21 f.
Harrell, Isaac, 375
Harrington, James, 112, 370, 457,
570 f., 601
Hartz, Louis, 53 f., 361, 437
Heavenly City of the Eighteenth -
Century Philosophers , The
(Becker), 479
Heimert, Alan, 43 f., 57 £.
Heister, Joseph, 377
Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 474 f.
Henry, Patrick, 105, 160 f250,
252 f., 381 ff., 392 f., 414, 441 f.,
463 ff., 491, 530, 534 f., 539,
541, 549, 553-555, 565
History, colonial American
concepts of, 40
eighteenth-century political use of,
397-407, 411 f., 490-492, 496,
588
human behavior and, 18, 489 f.;
see also Man
determinism of, 6, 16 f.
progressives’ interpretation of, 8 f.,
18, 355; see also Beard, Charles
A.
History of Political Parties in the
Province of New York , 1760-
1776 (Becker), 9, 280 f.
History of the United States (Ban¬
croft), 3
Hobbes, Thomas, 307, 312, 442, 453,
517 f.
Hofstadter, Richard, 59
Holmes, Abiel, 543
Hooker, Richard, 471 f.
Hopkins, Stephen, 156, 171, 195, 211
House of Representatives, 71, 300,
357, 414 f., 533-535, 539, 544,
547, 549 ff., 565
See also Congress, Federal;
Government, federal; Senate
Howard, Francis, 95
Howard, Martin, 173 f., 190, 211
Hume, David, 71, 401 f., 436, 447,
489 f., 492-503, 577
Hunter, Robert, 90, 94
Hutcheson, Francis, 489
Hutchinson, Anne, 261
Hutchinson, Thomas, 46, 158, 179 f.,
190, 211, 217, 223, 288
Hyde, Edward, 90
“Ideal of a Perfect Commonwealth”
(Hume), 492 f.
Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution , The (Bailyn), 39,
54
Independence, colonial American
movement for, 5, 302 ff., 306,
339, 345
See also Revolution, American,
ideology of
Indians, North American, 35, 117 ff.
Individualism, radical, 310-316, 318
See also Declaration of Inde¬
pendence; Government, minor¬
ity rights in
Ingersoll, Jared, 157, 197
Ireland, 116 ff., 169, 183, 186, 226
Isolationism, American, 314 f.
Jackson, Andrew, 58, 507
Jackson, Richard, 169, 176 ff.
Jameson, J. Franklin, 13, 53, 281
Jay, John, 381, 383, 385, 394, 442,
468
Jefferson, Thomas, 58, 104, 107, 181,
223, 225, 239, 242, 250, 252,
266, 268, 274, 282 f., 296, 302,
312 f., 315, 319, 341, 347, 350 ff.,
358 f., 406, 410, 415, 441 f., 446,
465 f., 497, 506 f., 509, 556, 570,
573 f., 578, 581, 606
Jensen, Merrill, 15 f., 380-384, 388,
442
Jeremiad, the, 238, 256 ff., 262-265,
269 f., 272
See also Ethic, Puritan
Johnson, Robert, 90, 94
Johnson, Samuel, 488
Johnston, Augustus, 197
Johnston, Gabriel, 91
Johnston, Samuel, 544
Jouvenal, Robert de, 441
Jury, trial by, 192 ff., 198, 202, 216 f.,
542 f.
See also Courts, colonial, com¬
mon-law
INDEX 621
Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 489
Keith, William, 89, 94
Kenyon, Cecelia M., 54, 56 f., 58,
71 f., 276, 381 f.
King Philip's War, 255
King’s Friends: The Composition
and Motives of the American
Loyalist Claimants , The (Brown,
W.) 45 f.
Kinsey, John, 91
Koebner, Richard, 26 f., 110
Knollenberg, Bernhard, 31 f.
Knox, Henry, 381, 383, 385, 391
Kraus, Michael, 25
Kuhl, Frederick, 377
Labaree, Benjamin W., 35 f.
Labaree, Leonard W., 6, 87 f.
Lamp of Eocperience: Whig History
and the Intellectual Origins of
the American Revolution, The
(Colbourn), 40
Lancaster, William, 550
Langdon, Samuel, 256, 258, 263-
265, 271
Lansing, John, Jr., 374, 391 £., 445,
453 f., 552
Lansing, Robert, 537
La Rochefoucauld, Francois de, 471
Laurens, Henry, 20, 197-199, 204,
239
Law-, civil, 185, 193, 202
common., 183, 185, 193, 195
natural, see Man, in state of nature
Law of Liberty , The (Zubly), 259
Lecky, W. E. H., 4
Lee, Richard Henry, 105, 239, 375,
383, 392, 414, 464 f., 534, 546,
554
Leigh, Egerton, 198 f.
Lenin, Vladimir U., 319
Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax ,
to His Friend in Rhode Island
(Howard), 173 f.
Letters of a Federal Farmer (Lee),
534
Leviathan , The (Hobbes), 313
Libby, Orin J., 369
Liberal Tradition in America , The
(Haxtz), 53
Liberty, colonial American concepts
of, 3, 24, 38, 40, 45, 54, 59, 72 f.,
194-196, 207 ff., 214 ff., 220,
222 f., 230-235, 241-243, 245 f.,
256, 258 f., 266, 271, 283, 288,
309, 313 f., 317, 339, 494, 505 f.,
509, 573, 578
power and, 589-594
safeguards of, 581, 585 f., 589
See also Democracy
Lincoln, Charles H., 9, 11 f., 28
Littleton, Edward, 114
Livingston, Robert, 394
Livingston, William, 104
Lloyd, David, 89
Locke, John, 190, 229, 256, 261,
264, 267, 282, 306, 312 f., 349,
370, 399, 457, 468, 488, 508,
516, 518, 574, 599, 602
Lotz, Nicholas, 377
Louis XVI, king of France, 260
Louisiana Territory, 314
Lovejoy, A. O., 18, 38, 69, 70, 437
Lowndes, Rawlins, 369, 548, 555
Loyalists, 45-47, 306, 343, 388
Lyttelton, George, 1st Baron, 180
Lyttelton, William H., 95
Mabley, Gabriel Bonnet de, 349
McCormick, Richard P., 51
McDonald, Forrest, 59-61, 62, 64,
65-67, 364
McKitrick, Eric, 68 f., 364, 441
Madison, James, 71 f., 74, 292 f.,
305, 307, 370, 381, 383 if., 389 £.,
394, 399 f., 404, 406 f., 409 ff.,
413 f., 436 ff., 445 f., 447-450,
454 ff., 464 ff., 475-484, 492-
503, 519-524, 537, 544, 559,
563, 577 f., 585 f., 594-595,
597 f.
Magna Carta, 202, 204, 582
Main Currents in American Thought:
The Colonial Mind (Parrington),
14 f.
Main, Jackson Turner, 29, 53, 61 f.,
64, 66, 68, 321
Man, nature of, 6, 16 £., 38 f., 44,
69, 70, 73 f., 95 f., 216, 238,
264 f., 269, 317, 403 f., 436,
469-476, 478 ff., 486, 488-490,
502, 537 f., 556-559, 572, 577 f.,
585, 604 f.,* see also Individual¬
ism, radical
622 INDEX
Man, nature of ( Continued )
in state of civil society, 307 f.,
309 f., 312 ff., 360, 587 f.; see
also Constitution, Federal, ideo¬
logical nature of; Government,
eighteenth-century theories of
in state of nature, 306 if., 339 f.,
343, 350, 360, 475, 573, 587 f.,
594
Mandeville, Bernard de, 472
Marchant, Henry, 249 f.
Marshall, John, 465
Martin, James, 377
Martin, Luther, 446, 453, 456, 466
Maryland, 27, 51, 92, 95, 98, 105,
162 ff., 169, 219, 343, 368 f.,
378, 389, 456
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 326 ff., 332 f., 335; see
also Colonies, American, politi¬
cal representation in
Marx, Karl, 521 f.
Mason, George, 249, 350, 355, 369,
383, 400, 456, 459, 463, 532,
534, 539 if., 546, 549 ff., 559
Massachusetts, 25, 29, 33, 46, 51 f.,
58, 89 f., 93 ff., 97, 104, 106,
120, 137, 156, 158 ff., 163 ff.,
169, 176 f., 179, 185, 190-200,
204, 209 ff., 215 ff., 220 ff., 226,
240, 256 f., 267, 285, 317, 337,
374, 376, 388, 402, 449, 464,
576 f.
Antifederalists in, 535 f., 539, 543
county conventions in, 425-429,
432 f.
General Court of, 416-431
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 328, 335; see also Colo¬
nies, American, political repre¬
sentation in
state constitution of, 342 f., 345,
346-354, 355 ff., 416, 418-420,
425 ff., 432 f., 575
state legislature of, 418-425, 427,
429-434
See also Boston Massacre;
Boston Tea Party; New Eng¬
land; Shays's Rebellion
Massachusetts Government Act, 107,
199, 222 f.
Mather, Cotton, 239, 257, 264
Mayflower Compact, 596-597, 603
Mayhew, Jonathan, 209 f., 233, 262
Mercantilism, British, and colonial
policy, 77, 79-86, 111, IIS-119
definition of, 76 f., 79 f.
Merchants, colonial, 10 f., 21, 49,
196-203, 237, 240, 243-255,
280 f., 324 ff., 331, 333, 375 f.
See also New England, eco¬
nomic development of; Revo¬
lution, American, economic
aspects of
Miller, Perry, 40 ff., 207
Molasses Act, 19, 32, 84 f., 186 f.
Money policy, British, 77, 80, 84
See also Colonies, American,
money policy of; Confedera¬
tion, fiscal disputes during
Monroe, James, 546
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Sec-
ondat, 282, 370, 399, 457, 468,
489, 492 ff., 516, 530 f., 546 f.,
549, 565, 577, 588-591, 592 f.,
598
Morality, colonial American concepts
of, 40-45, 230-233, 237 ff.,
241 f., 245 ff., 250 f.
See also Colonies, American
public religion in; Ethic, Puri¬
tan
Morgan, Edmund S., 32 f., 37, 40 ff.,
44, 55, 59, 73, 366
Morris, Gouverneur, 381 ff., 387, 410,
456 f., 460, 463, 482-^84
Morris, Robert, 64 f., 296, 376, 381,
383, 385, 387
Munroe, John A., 51
Namier, Lewis, 47 f., 88
Nationalism, 76 f.
in eighteenth-century America, 3 f.,
24 ff., 64 f., 67-69, 72
See also Federalists
Navigation Acts, 19-22, 34, 37, 77,
80 ff., Ill, 138, 164, 171, 183,
186, 188, 190, 213
See also Courts, colonial, ad¬
miralty
Nelson, William H., 46 f., 58 f.
Netherlands, British mercantilism
and, 80, 82
Nettels, Curtis P., 21 f., 76
Nevins, Allan, 13, 370
New England, 32, 80, 86, 226, 238 f.,
359, 531
economic development in, 82-84
public religion in, 253—257, 261—
265, 267-273
See also individual colonies;
North, the
New Hampshire, 92, 94, 163-164,
343, 356, 369, 394, 444, 464
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 324 f., 327-330, 331,
335; see also Colonies, Amer¬
ican, political representation in
New Jersey, 27, 29, 51, 91, 95, 163 f.,
209, 215, 255, 359, 368, 388,
440, 452 f.
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 325 f., 327 f., 331 f.,
335; see also Colonies, Amer¬
ican, political representation in
New Jersey Plan, 450-453, 454
Newton, Isaac, 488-499
New York, 10, 29, 36, 46, 90, 94 £.,
104, 106, 155 f., 159, 163 f., 166,
209, 215 f240, 243 £., 246, 253,
285 f., 343, 358, 440, 454, 468
antifederalists in, 371—374, 375,
388, 390 f., 393 f., 464 f., 535,
537, 541, 545, 548, 551 £., 556 f.
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 325, 327 f., 330 f.; see
also Colonies, American, politi¬
cal representation in
Nicholson, Francis, 90, 102
North, the, 11, 389, 532, 539-540,
559-560
political development in, 89 f., 91,
92
See also individual colonies;
states
North Carolina, 46, 52, 91, 94 £., 100,
154, 195, 215, 284 f., 336, 370,
378, 393, 465, 537, 539 f., 554 f.
state constitution of, 343 f., 352
North, Frederick, Lord, 227, 250, 255
Nova Scotia, 188, 193
colonial local government of, 92 f.,
103
Observations concerning the Increase
INDEX 623
of Mankind, Peopling of Coun¬
tries, etc. (Franklin), 114, 119,
122
Osgood, Herbert L., 4 ff., 87
Otis, James, 104, 116, 159, 179, 189,
201, 203, 211
Paine, Thomas, 54, 267, 274, 398,
312 f., 319, 547, 570 f., 583 f.
Palmer, Robert R., 58, 287, 321, 438
Parliament, British, 13 f., 48-50,
106-108, 120 ff., 137-139, 201 f.,
204-206, 208, 218 f., 228, 249,
303, 308-310, 360, 514, 570,
572, 575
colonial judicial legislation by,
183 f., 186 f., 192 f.
See also Taxes, colonial, levied
by Parliament; Taxes, Parlia¬
mentary theory of
Parrington, Vernon L., 14 f.
Paterson, William, 44 9 —4 53, 454 f
458
Peace of Paris, 24, 111
Pendleton, Edmund, 465
Penn, William, 184 f., 287
Pennsylvania, 10, 27, 29, 36, 52, 89,
94 f., 98, 104, 162 ff., 175 f.,
184, 214 f., 240, 255, 285, 298 f.,
312, 336, 370, 376 f., 440, 449,
456 f., 547, 557 f.
Charter of Privileges, 89
public religion in, 257—259, 265-
267, 272 f.
state constitution of, 342 f., 344—
346, 357 ff., 440
Pequot War, 255
Pettit, Charles, 377
Pinckney, Charles C., 411, 452, 461
Pitt, William, the elder, 118, 167,
177 f., 180, 226
Planters, Southern, 11, 21, 80-82,
326 f., 333, 375 f.
See also South, the
Pocock, J. G. A., 38
Political Ideas of the American Revo¬
lution, The (Adams), 13, 152
Pole, J. R., 30, 397
Politics, theories of power in, 38 f.,
70, 126 f., 139-146, 227, 268,
285 f., 339, 343 f., 371, 381,
476-478, 532, 537 ff., 543 f..
624 INDEX
Politics ( Continued )
546, 559, 561, 585 f., 588, 589-
598, 603, 605 f., 608 f.
two-party system in, 294
See also Constitutional Con¬
vention, democratic politics
at; Government
Pope, Alexander, 472-474
Populists, 55, 297 f., 300 f.
See also Democracy, eight¬
eenth-century American
PostLethwayt, Malachi, 116—119
Pownall, Thomas, 91, 112, 177 f.
Presidency (U.S.), 296, 299 f., 415,
536, 539 ff., 547, 549 ff., 558,
565 f.
See also Government, execu¬
tive power in
Price, Richard, 229, 283, 298
Priestley, Joseph, 229, 250, 283, 408
Property, private, 54, 59, 72, 246,
285, 306, 310 f., 351 f., 379, 395,
420, 482-484, 511 ff., 518, 520,
526, 559 f.
See also Class conflict, in
America; Liberty, colonial con¬
cepts of
Quakers, 9, 261, 344 f., 427
See also Churches, noncon¬
formist
Quartering Act, 107, 223
Quebec Act, 223
Quincy, Josiah, 211, 223
Randolph, Edmund, 369, 374, 449,
455 f., 462 fir.
Rapin, Paul de, 225
Religion, disestablishment of, 284 f.,
289, 353, 358
See also Church, Anglican;
Churches; Colonies, Amer¬
ican, public religion in; Ethic,
Puritan; God; Morality, colo¬
nial concepts of; Revolution,
American, religious roots of
Revenue Act, 153
Revivalism, 273 f., 284 f.
Revolution, American, distrust of
political parties in, 294 f., 314,
316
conservative elements of, 12, 15 f.,
45-47, 50 ff., 53-55, 58, 235,
276, 278 f., 281, 286 f., 289, 293,
300, 302, 319 f., 337, 344 f.,
355, 358, 360 f., 379 f.
economic aspects of, 8, 9-12, 14,
16, 37, 39, 95, 240 f., 278, 294,
319, 339
ideological elements in, 6, 16 f.,
38 f., 44, 73 f., 120 f., 181 f.,
204 if., 232 ff., 236-251, 282 ff.,
289 f., 295, 306, 310, 488, 602,
604—609; see also Democracy,
eighteenth-century American
immediate causes of, 31-45, 202,
204-206, 208-235
political aspects of, 8 f., 16, 28,
30 ff., 37, 39, 44, 55 f., 73, 88,
95, 97, 101, 105-109, 152, 240,
277, 286 f., 339-343, 348; see
also Colonies, American, consti¬
tutional issues in; Government,
colonial local
political ideology of, 294 f., 301,
305 f., 309 f., 313, 318-320, 340-
343, 360 f., 569-579, 588-591,
596
psychology of resistance in, 37-
45; see also Independence, colo¬
nial movement for
radical elements of, 12 f., 16, 43 f.,
55-59, 220, 229-231, 235, 276,
278 f., 281, 293, 296-301, 302,
310-316, 319, 320, 345, 358,
360, 361
religious roots of, 40-45, 57 f.,
124 f., 230-233, 251-274, 568 ff.,
572 f.; see also Ethic, puritan
scope of, 579-581, 582, 586, 593 f.,
596 ff.
See also Army, Continental;
Class conflict in America
Revolution, French, 8, 12, 273, 319,
359, 395, 488, 584, 587 f., 594,
604; see also France
Revolution, right of, 128 f., 130-133,
139, 256, 260, 262, 264 f., 269
Revolution, Russian, 319, 582
Revolution, theories of nature of, 6, 8
Rhode Island, 27, 29, 89, 156 ff., 171,
185 f., 195, 211, 243, 328, 336,
342, 378, 387, 390 ff., 444, 465,
497
See also New England
Robbins, Caroline, 38 f., 282
Robinson, John, 91, 97
Roche, John P., 67 f., 69 f., 437
Rockingham, Charles Watson-Went-
worth, 2nd Marquis of, 168 f.,
178 ff., 193
Rossiter, Clinton, 24, 437
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 348 ff., 402,
533, 561 f., 588, 604
Rush, Benjamin, 235, 239, 398, 415
Rutland, Robert A., 68
Savelle, Max, 24 f.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., 10 ff., 25
Schuyler, Robert L., 398-401, 440
Seabury, Samuel, 223, 231
Second Treatise of Government
(Locke), 306ff., 311, 313
Sedgwick, Theodore, 431, 433 f.
Senate (U.S.), 71, 300, 316, 357,
414 f., 482—484, 513-515, 533,
536, 539 f., 544, 547, 549-553,
558, 565 £.
See also Congress, Federal;
Government, federal; House of
Representatives
Seven Years’ War, 5, 24 f., 35, 87,
89, 91, 93, 97, 103f.. Ill, 182,
187, 213, 220, 225
Shays, Daniel, 416 f., 426, 430
Shays’s Rebellion, 52, 65, 69, 390 f.,
396, 406, 409, 411, 416 f.
economic factors in, 417-419,
420 f., 424, 428, 430
political factors in, 418-434
role of press in, 421 f., 433
Shirley, William, 90, 94, 120 f., 224
Shute, Samuel, 90, 94
Shy, John, 34 f., 49
Sidney, Algernon, 229, 349
Slavery, see Colonies, American,
slavery in; Confederation, slav¬
ery in
Smith, Adam, 78, 489, 490
Smith, J. Allen, 379, 549
Smith, Melancton, 535, 548, 551 f.,
557, 563
Smith, William, 99 f., 265-267, 269,
286, 323
Social Contract (Rousseau), 349 f.,
561
Sosin, Jack M., 49
INDEX 625
South, the, 11, 335 f., 359, 389, 531,
532, 539 f., 559 f.
economic development of, 80-82
political development in, 90 ff.
See also individual colonies;
Planters, Southern; states
South Carolina, 90, 93 ff., 98 f.,
102 ff., 113, 163 f., 197, 218 f.,
259 f., 284, 358, 369, 456, 555
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 327 f., 334 f.
See also Colonies, American,
political representation in
Stamp Act, 10, 13, 23, 25, 32 ff., 73,
106, 137, 150, 151, 152-165,
169 ff., 174 ff., 187 ff., 196 f.,
201, 208, 210, 212, 216 ff., 227,
231, 233, 240 ff., 249, 255, 257,
303, 570
Stamp Act Congress, 163-167, 179,
188, 191
Staple Act, 80, 121
Stiles, Ezra, 249, 271, 272
Stourzh, Gerald, 39
Sugar Act, 19, 32, 34, 153, 155 ff.,
187 f., 192 ff., 200 ff., 213, 240 f.
Supreme Court, 553 f.
See also Government, role
of judiciary in; Government,
separation of powers in
Tariffs, protective, 77, 84
See also Navigation Acts
Taylor, Robert J., 51 f.
Taxes, colonial American, levied by
Parliament, 13 f., 19 f., 33,
35 ff., 41, 85, 106 ff., 120, 125,
137 f., 150, 151-181, 182 f.,
187 ff., 191, 194, 196, 201, 204,
212 f., 216, 240 f., 245-246, 250,
303, 307, 369 ff.; theory of, 165-
167, 169, 170-180, 191 f.
external, 151-159, 161-165, 170-
180
internal, 151—159, 161—165, 170
levied by Congress, 64 f., 384, 534,
544, 555
Parliamentary theory of, 167-169,
176 f., 179, 191 f.
Tea Act, 10, 36, 227
Thatcher, Oxenbridge, 211, 217
Thomas, Robert P., 21 f.
62 6 INDEX
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 53, 523, 524,
607
Tolies, Frederick B., 53
Tories, in American colonies, 45-47
See also Loyalists; Revolu¬
tion, American, conservative
elements of
Townshend Acts, 10, 13 f., 20, 34 f.,
151, 180 f., 196, 212, 218, 222,
241, 243, 248
Townshend, Charles, 49, 151 f., 196
Trade Acts, 165
Trade, balance of, 77
Treaty of Paris, 3, 257, 272
Trevelyan, George O., 4, 48
Turner, Frederick T., 11
Tyler, John, 389
Ubbelohde, Carl, 34 f.
United States, see Confederation;
Congress; Government, federal
Van Cortland, Pierre, 325
Van Schaack, Henry, 431, 433 f.
Virginia, 21, 25, 27, 29, 91, 94 f.,
97, 104 f., 155 f., 159 ff., 195,
219, 223, 252 ff., 261, 296, 350,
359, 369, 374, 387 ff., 393 f.,
409, 440, 449, 452, 455, 574
antifederalists in, 370, 375 f., 463-
465, 532, 534 f., 539, 541 f.,
547
representation in colonial legisla¬
ture in, 326-328, 333 ff., 338,
384; see also Colonies, Ameri¬
can, political representation in
social reform acts of, 284
Virginia Plan, 445, 447-453 ff.
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de,
282, 471
Walpole, Horace, 47, 102, 106
War of Jenkin’s Ear, 111
Washington, George, 82, 266 f., 368,
383, 386 f., 391, 409, 442, 453,
458 f., 466, 487-491, 493, 557
Watts, Isaac, 283
Whigs, in American colonies, 46, 52,
54 f.
revolutionary idealism of, 3 f., 40
Weber, Max, 237 f.
Wentworth, Benning, 92, 94
We the People: The Economic Or¬
igins of the Constitution (Mc¬
Donald), 59—62, 66
West Indies, colonial trade with,
83 f.
West, Samuel, 256, 265, 271
Wilkes, John, 218 ff., 228, 230, 248
Williams, John, 545
Williamson, Hugh, 409
Wilson, James, 107, 154, 213, 296,
308, 370, 383, 386, 399 f.,
456 ff., 573
Winthrop, James, 530 ff., 559
Winthrop, John, 261, 269, 319
Witherspoon, John, 272
Wood, Gordon S., 45
Wright, Benjamin F., 54 f.
Yates, Robert, 374, 391 f., 445, 450,
452
Yorke, Charles, 168
Young, Arthur, 583
Zubly, John J., 259, 266
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