The
IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS
of the
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
BERNARD BAILYN
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2017
Copyright © 1967, 1992, 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Cover design by Graciela Galup
978-0-674-97787-7 (EPUB)
978-0-674-97794-5 (MOBI)
978-0-674-97795-2 (PDF)
Figure pp. xvi–xvii: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Basilica of Constantine, with a Street Seen through Arches on the Left. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Roderick K. MacLeod, M13622. Photograph: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Figure pp. xviii–xix: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Temple of Portunas (?) (The Round Temple near S. Maria in Cosmedin). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Permanent transfer from the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Gift of Thomas Palmer, Esq., of Boston, 1772, 2008.312.47. Photograph: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Postscript, “Fulfillment: A Commentary on the Constitution,” is adapted from Faces of Revolution, Copyright © 1990 by Bernard Bailyn, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. “Mind” from Things of This World, Copyright © 1956 by Richard Wilbur, is reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
PREFACE TO THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
I am grateful to the Harvard University Press for giving this book a new lease on life and thereby, incidentally, leading me to review it—not to evaluate it but only to note my reactions to re-reading it now. For though the book remains exactly as it was first written and supplemented, the readers’—and my own—response to it may well have changed to reflect the circumstances of our time. But the book is not a tract. It is a work of history, the history, in part, of our national origins, which must forever concern us. I note in this new Preface what seem to be now some features of the book that I saw perhaps less clearly in earlier years.
The first is the sense of emergence, which is what much of the book is about. It traces one of those critical passages of history where elements of our own familiar present, still part of an unfamiliar past, begin to disentangle themselves, begin to emerge amid confusion and uncertainty. The crucial words in the pounding debate on constitutional principles and human rights in these initial years of the Revolution were not new, but their meanings were beginning to shift. These inner transformations were neither quick nor clear. They appeared contentiously, erratically from within the struggle for resistance to Britain’s sovereignty. The leaders of resistance, as I wrote in the original Foreword to the book, were not philosophers or political theorists but merchants, lawyers, planters, and preachers. They did not write formal discourses, nor did they feel bound to adhere to traditional political maxims or to apparently logical reasoning that led to conclusions they feared. Edmund Burke, in his speech of 1774 on American taxation, caught their spirit exactly. If, he warned the British government, you keep making subtle arguments to justify a supreme sovereignty odious to those you govern, you will teach them to call your sovereignty into question.
When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, what will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery.
So, defiantly and experimentally, the colonial leaders twisted and turned to find new meanings within familiar concepts that they could accept. Britain’s “constitution” was famous for its protection of Britons’ freedoms. But what was it? It was what was constituted—a loose bundle of statutes, common law, and sanctioned practices, without explicit boundaries. In the course of the American struggle with Britain a new meaning emerged; the term “constitution” remained but was transformed. It came to mean a written, foundational structure of powers and rights superior to and controlling any subsequent enactments. So it was with the age-old concept of the balance of powers in a free state. The formal concept remained dominant in their thinking, but by a complex process, protracted and difficult to trace, the units in balance shifted from social orders or estates to the functioning branches of government.
What strikes me now, looking back over The Ideological Origins, is how much of the book is devoted to tracing just such transforming processes. So it was with rights: indistinguishable in the past from the privileges and liberties granted by rulers and municipalities—gifts, as it were, entangled in ancient customs and inscribed in statutes and royal decrees. But as the struggle to find more secure grounds for resistance to Britain’s powers developed, so did the transformation of the nature of rights, from sanctified privileges to the natural endowments of humanity based on the principles of reason and justice. None of the Revolutionary writers sought to repudiate the heritage of common and statutory law. Their aim was to establish the source of all rights in the laws of nature and the fundamental endowments of humanity, beyond the reach of legislative powers and executive mandates. It was left for the future to identify exactly what such rights were and to enact them into positive law, a struggle that we now know would have no end. But the Revolutionary generation created the basic transformation of the meaning of rights on what would prove to be the cusp of emerging modernity.
And so it was in other spheres of political thought: in the meaning of representation, in the nature of sovereignty, and in the amplitudes and boundaries of personal freedom. It was an emergent world, slowly becoming part of our familiar present.
I became keenly aware as well, as I went back through the book, of something quite different, something that had developed as the book was written. Some sections of the exposition proved to be a collage of quotations and paraphrases drawn from contributors to the Anglo-American debate—a contentious conversation, it would seem, among many speakers. Some of the writers I quoted or paraphrased were arguing with others directly but some were not; they simply joined the discussion to establish their views of the issues at hand. But however varied in their origins, their scattered comments, when brought together, became direct exchanges. Such constructed debates could produce useful results. A comment from one source could be brought together with its opposite, to show the outer boundaries of opinion, the limits of imagination. Or more commonly and more significantly, the complexity of opinion and the difficulty of establishing any kind of consensus could be shown by juxtaposing similar-seeming but in fact fundamentally different views, many of which became explicit conflicts as the controversy deepened.
But I knew that there were dangers in creating such quasi-conversational or confrontational collages. One could gather together similar sounding expressions to form an apparently consistent grouping, or tradition, or party line that in fact was an authorial construct, a tale of one’s own devising. So was I then not assuming some kind of collective mind at work and simply illustrating its fortunes with the documentation I had? There was no such collective mind, but there were vital issues around which scattered opinions could be gathered. They could reasonably and without contextual distortion be grouped together to form virtual discussions that expressed the heart of the matter.
Looking back at the result now, I find this unplanned feature of the book in itself still interesting, and perhaps at this distant point especially useful in conveying a sense of the intellectual
excitement of the pre-Revolutionary years of controversy, the raw conflicts and intractable difficulties of the problems the participants faced, and their constant experimentation in unknown territories of political and constitutional thought.
But of all my impressions on re-reading the book the most vivid is the Americans’ obsession with Power. It was not one among many concerns; it was their central concern. Power and its ravages engrossed their minds; they wrote about it again and again, elaborately and imaginatively—in pamphlets, letters, newspapers, sermons—in any medium available. But seeing it now with a broader knowledge of early modern political thought and culture, I was struck not only by how fully it permeates the book but also by the curious ways in which the writers expressed their concerns about the uses and misuses of power.
They wrote about the specific agencies of power they feared—royal armies, crown prerogatives, Parliamentary mandates, arbitrary magistrates—and about all the “usurpations” of power that would be listed in the Declaration of Independence. But they wrote more often and more eloquently of power itself: power in its essence, in its nature, whatever its manifestation—as an autonomous entity, a dark, independent, primordial force, pervasive and malign. As such it could be described only in metaphors, similes, and analogies. Power, they wrote, however evoked, “is like the ocean, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it.” It is like “jaws … always open to devour.” It is “like cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.” And it is everywhere in public life, and everywhere it is dominating, grasping, and absorbing. Liberty, its opposite, could not strongly stand before it. For liberty, as John Adams put it, always “skulking about in corners … hunted and persecuted in all countries by cruel power,” was in its nature delicate and sensitive, weak in the presence of power. It was to overcome the dark, engrossing force of power that all efforts to liberate mankind had been directed.
I can now see more clearly than before how this essentualization and personification of power and the metaphoric descriptions of its character came to suffuse their thinking. In a situation of political conflict with established authority they drew on the legacy of the “Commonwealthmen,” the “real Whigs,” who had struggled in the generation after the Revolution of 1688 to carry forward against the Hanoverian court dominated by Robert Walpole the reform principles of the seventeenth century. The great spokesmen and publicists of that earlier age, the political pamphleteers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, had been eloquent and prolific on the need for reform and the dangers of powerful autocracies. Their two most famous weekly publications were the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, which, republished in book form, together constituted 191 essays on “Liberty, Civil and Religious.” These pamphleteers of the 1720s expressed in vivid, challenging, defiant prose the basic themes on the nature and uses of power that the later American Patriots would fervently embrace.
These earlier writings overflowed with examples of the havoc wrought by power—power unfettered, power released, power allowed to tear at the vitals of free institutions and at the liberties of ordinary folk. In a free state power is a trust acquired by consent and used only for the people’s good. When it is acquired by force or deceit by those who use it to enhance their own glory and influence, power, they wrote, is arbitrary, and the people suffer deeply. Unconstrained monopolists of power become monsters, tyrants, savages, and they make the world “a slaughter-house,” a “desart.” They transform “blessings and plenty into curses and misery, great cities into gloomy solitudes, and their rich citizens into beggars and vagabonds.” The “Daemons” of power become worse the longer they wield their illegal force, until their victims, refusing to “be slaves to their own servants,” find it necessary for their survival to oppose them. And then, they wrote, the great upheavals ensue, as cities and nations are torn apart in the struggle for the uses of power.
These words of the earlier age on the dark progress of power lay deep in the American polemics of the 1760s and 1770s. Active resistance, the American Revolutionaries feared, was required against those who had gained, by brutality or guile or demagoguery, some measure of power’s dark essence.
Some people, they knew, seemed never to have known freedom, having been ruled by powerful despots time out of mind: the Russians, the Turks, and the Ottomans, governed by vicious leaders backed by the power of personal janissary troops. But what interested the Americans more than such legendary despotisms were examples of once-free states whose descent into autocracies of power had happened within living memory and had been recorded in detail by participants or contemporary witnesses.
Poland was a case in point—a nation, they believed, sunk in human misery, its peasant people reduced to barbarism, its social condition “a scene of carnage.” They could trace equally the loss of liberty in France under Louis XIV, the advent of autocracy in Sweden, and the revolts that shook Spain and severed its relation to Portugal. The most recent example of the loss of freedom was that of Denmark, a story that had been recorded in day-by-day, at times hour-by-hour detail by Viscount Molesworth, England’s envoy to Copenhagen under William III. In four short days, they learned from Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark, that country had “changed from an estate little different from aristocracy to as absolute a monarchy as any is at present.” Molesworth, an eyewitness, knew exactly what had happened. At a critical moment, seeking safety from the impositions of the nobles, the two lower orders, the commons and the clergy, fearful and angry, gave the king, their supposed protector, the absolute power of the state, only to discover that “the little finger of an absolute prince can be heavier than the loins of many nobles.”
But the greatest example they knew of the descent from freedom to autocracy was the most distant from them in time but so familiar to them as to be contemporaneous in their thinking. This was the fortunes of ancient Rome.
At the start of the book, I wrote at length of the Americans’ deep immersion in the writings of antiquity. “Knowledge of classical authors,” I wrote, “was universal among colonists with any degree of education,” and I referred to the vast array of classical authors they knew and referred to—not merely the obvious Latin writers like Cicero, Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, Ovid, and Virgil, and not merely, among the Greeks, Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch, but also lesser known writers like Strabo, Nepos, Petronius, Lucan, and Marcus Aurelius. There was much misunderstanding in their readings; but still, I wrote, they found in the classics their ideal selves, and to some extent their inner voices. And then I wrote:
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs.
The objections to these words by many writers on the classics in America have not subsided in the years since their appearance. It seems that everyone who writes about the subject seems obliged to register, upon reading these words, a sense of violation, of desecration, of lèse-majesté. But for those who knew Molesworth’s Account of Denmark, the dismal fortunes of Poland, and the collapse of good order in Spain and Sweden, the destruction of the ancient Roman republic, the advent of Caesarian power and the resulting dictatorial principate, was one among many illustrations.
The fullest and most famous history of the destruction of Roman freedom and the rise of imperial power that left Rome in ruins was the detailed two-volume account by the Abbé René-Aubert Vertot, “one of the most popular writers of the first half of the eighteenth century” (Caroline Robbins). English translations of his Revolutions That Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic (1720) were in almost every library, private or institutional, in British North America. And so too were copies of Vertot’s parallel accounts of the loss of freedom in Spain and Sweden. They were all illustrations of a universal phenomenon. What was unique about the Roman example was the vividnes
s and drama of the personalities involved and the fame and familiarity of some of the major texts of the story. John Adams, age 23, recorded his joy in reading aloud, alone at night in his room, Cicero’s four orations against Cataline. The “sweetness and grandeur of his sounds,” Adams wrote, “give pleasure enough” to justify reading the great speeches even if one doesn’t understand their meaning. His younger contemporary, Josiah Quincy, Jr., a neophyte lawyer with ambitions to play an important role as a learned public intellectual, far exceeded Adams as a classicist. His publications and private correspondence are laced with references to the classical authors. Scarcely a page goes by without one or more references to ancient writings. He seems intellectually to have inhabited the classical world. He and others as well educated knew not only the deeds of Cato but his stoicism as well, not only Brutus’s role in history but his self-sacrificing nature, and not only what Tacitus recorded but the terse, sardonic style of his writing as well. And what they knew of these famous figures of the ancient past stirred their imaginations as nothing else could.
Drawing on all the sources they had available—Vertot’s volumes and those of other historians of Rome as well as the mass of facts and comments that had appeared in the opposition press a generation earlier—the Americans rejoiced in the freedom of Rome’s republic and celebrated its checks on the unlimited power of magistrates. They enjoyed reading about the magnificence of Rome at its height and lamented its decline and fall when freedom was destroyed by the power of imperial despots who lived in corrupt magnificence and left behind a broken and supine people wandering about in the wreckage around them. Their paraphrases of Vertot were dramatic. In the struggle of warring factions in the great contest for power at the end of the Republic
Rome and all Italy was but one slaughter-house. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, fell sacrifices to the ambition of a few. Rivers of blood ran in the publick streets, and proscriptions and massacres were esteemed sport and pastime, till at length two thirds of the people were destroyed and the rest made slaves to the most wicked and contemptible wretches of mankind.
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