The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  Thus ended, Vertot had concluded, “the greatest, the noblest state that ever adorned the worldly theatre.” To which, in 1720 the English “Cato” had commented, “I wish I could say that the Abbot Vertot’s description of the Roman state in its last declension suited no other state in our own time. I hope that we ourselves have none of these corruptions and abuses to complain of.” But it was only a hope, of which the American leaders increasingly despaired. Many active in the struggle with Britain had come to agree with the well-informed, well-educated member of the Continental Congress who wrote in 1774: “From the fate of Rome, Britain may trace the course of its present degeneracy and its impending destruction. Similar causes will ever produce similar effects.”

  In Britain as in ancient Rome, the Americans believed, factions were tearing the nation apart. The ancient story of encroaching power and the growing corruption of the newly rich that had been so clearly illustrated in the case of Rome were being reenacted in Britain, threatening the British empire as it had the Roman.

  There seems to have been no end to the torrent of writings the Americans had at hand that dwelt on the beauties and the glory of the ancient Roman republic and its ultimate destruction by the advent of arbitrary power. So vast, so complex, and so rich in meaning were the ancient world-historical events that no definitive account of them, they believed, could ever be given. Properly to describe the “noble” subject of liberty and power in ancient Rome is a task, Trenchard and Gordon had written in 1722, “to which no human mind is equal,”

  for neither the sublimest wits of antiquity, nor the brightest geniuses of late or modern time, assisted with all the powers of rhetorick and all the stimulations of poetick fire … ever did, or ever could, or ever can, describe … sufficiently the beauty of the one [liberty] or the deformity of the other [power]. Language [they wrote] fails in it, and words are too weak.

  But if language fails and words are not sufficient, how could one recover the Americans’ vision of the power-driven corruption of the ancient world? I wondered about this and thought that where words fail, images might succeed.

  What did eighteenth-century Rome look like? How did its appearance relate to the Americans’ concerns? Few colonists of the Revolutionary years had visited continental Europe, fewer still knew the art world of contemporary Rome. But some did, and others were well informed. Thomas Hollis, Harvard’s English benefactor, in constant touch with the American Patriots, was intimately involved with artists and their works in France and Italy, and especially in Rome. It was in the Roman art world that one finds the visual expressions of the Americans’ concerns. They lie in the artistic achievements of their contemporary, the celebrated Roman engraver and print maker, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom Hollis knew well.

  Piranesi’s themes in his famous images of antiquity were theirs. Both he and the Americans dwelled on the glory of Rome as a free state and the squalor of its decline and fall. In his great series of prints of contemporary Rome, his Vedute de Roma and the Antichità Romane, copies of which Hollis sent to Harvard, Piranesi depicted everything the colonists could have imagined about the greatness of the ancient city and its surroundings: the monumental structures of all kinds, the temples, the celebratory columns, the arches, the tombs, the fountains, the baths, the circuses, the colosseums, all enhanced in monumentality by mannerist exaggerations and by the manipulation of perspective. But the Vedute were not only scenes of magnificent architecture. Many of the structures were in ruins, and Piranesi portrayed them as they were: testimonies of the power-driven barbarism that had destroyed the classical world. Some of the crumbling buildings had been shabbily rebuilt to serve as churches, others had been patched together to form ragged habitations with farm equipment scattered about. A few people wander around like “human insects,” in Marguerite Yourcenar’s words, shuffling “through the rubble or the brush” aimlessly leaning on staves, occasionally gesturing to sights unseen as if guiding strangers through the crumbling ruins. In the shadows of once-great structures, washing is being hung out to dry, donkeys are balking, dogs are barking, goats are wandering among fallen segments of magnificent columns. Here and there people in small groups seem to be conversing, but mostly they are solitary, and everywhere they are “reduced to infinitesimal proportions by the enormity of the edifices.”

  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Basilica of Maxentius

  Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Temple of Portunas

  These scenes of vast power and “minuscule humanity” appear in most concentrated form in Piranesi’s earliest and most famous prints, the sixteen nightmarish, hallucinatory scenes of wildly imagined prisons, the Carceri—deep, gargantuan, cavernous, and darkly threatening spaces with sweeping ranges of staircases and platforms that lead nowhere, soaring ropes of heavy chains, spiked wheels, racks, and other instruments of torture. Everywhere in these vast inhuman halls is a sense of the brutality of power. The people scattered here and there on the platforms and stairs are simply watching, dwarfed by the monumental stone labyrinths that surround them.

  There were, of course, no such prisons in Rome or anywhere else. They were products of Piranesi’s imagination, his dark dreams, his capricci, his fantasies. But these imaginings were well within the range of the Americans’ fears of uncontrolled power, which would appear also in the great popularity in the colonies as in Europe of Cesare Beccaria’s tract, On Crime and Punishment. Written in 1764 to reform the entire judicial system of the ancien régime, it centered on the issues of arbitrary power.

  Such are a few of the features of the book that stand out to me most clearly now. But they are part of the larger design of the book, which I hope in its entirety still conveys an understanding of the ideas, beliefs, fears, and aspirations that inspired the rebellion against Britain and ultimately the founding of the American nation.

  B. B.

  2017

  PREFACE TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  Thinking back to the inception of this book, almost three decades ago, I can recall the intense excitement and the sense of discovery I felt in studying freshly the ideological themes of Revolutionary America. I, and others who shared that excitement, had been surprised to see the dominant cluster of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that came to light when the Enlightenment platitudes were put aside and one concentrated on what the leaders of the Revolutionary movement were actually saying, where their ideas had actually come from, how those ideas had cohered, and how, though derived from a different world, they had articulated circumstances unique to North America. Those discoveries emerged from a deeply contextualist approach to history—an immersion in the detailed circumstances of a distant era and an effort to understand that world not as it anticipated the future but as it was experienced by those who lived in it.

  In that context it became clear that the ideology of the American Revolution was a blend of ideas and beliefs that were extremely radical for the time—and that are implicitly radical still. In fact, I called the book when it was first published The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution, and worked out some of the broader implications of that theme in Chapter VI: “The Contagion of Liberty.” The ideology of the Revolution, derived from many sources, was dominated by a peculiar strand of British political thought. It was a cluster of convictions focused on the effort to free the individual from the oppressive misuse of power, from the tyranny of the state. But the spokesmen of the Revolution—the pamphleteers, essayists, and miscellaneous commentators—were not philosophers and they did not form a detached intelligentsia. They were active politicians, merchants, lawyers, plantation owners, and preachers, and they were not attempting to align their thought with that of major figures in the history of political philosophy whom modern scholars would declare to have been seminal. They did not think of themselves as “civic humanists,” nor did I describe them as such in attempting to characterize their thought. They would have been surprised to hear that they had fallen into so neat a pattern in the history of pol
itical thought. They believed that any political system, certainly all republics, had to be based in some significant degree on virtue, but they had no illusions about the virtue of ordinary people, and all of them believed in the basic value of personal property, its preservation and the fostering of economic growth. They were both “civic humanists” and “liberals,” though with different emphases at different times and in different circumstances. And indeed it is the flexibility of their ideas, the complex variations that could be harmoniously composed on the main themes, that has proven the most impressive product of the later studies of Revolutionary ideology. The force and cohesiveness of the original ideas and beliefs were clear from the start, but not their inclusiveness, their adaptability, and their resilience in the face of changing demands and circumstances. These qualities emerged as the story was carried forward beyond 1776, and one could examine in detail the encounters of these ideas with new and different problems.

  In the first phase of their effort to think through and put to use the ideas they had inherited and valued most—the main subject of this book—they directed their attention to corruption abroad and the acute political dangers they faced at home, and concluded that perpetuation of the freedom they had known required, at whatever cost, the destruction of the political and constitutional system that had hitherto governed them. In the next phase—reforming, according to progressive principles, the public life of the separate states—they drew on ideas, implicit and explicit in what had gone before, related to the technical problems of liberalizing the small-scale governments with which they were deeply familiar and which made no claims to the powers of nation-states. The final phase—perverse, it seemed to many, in view of the main concerns of the pre-Revolutionary years—was the construction of a new national government of great potential power, a government that would rule over a diverse community and that previously had existed, feebly, only in the desperation of war. But to build such a nation-state to replace the power system from which they had only recently escaped seemed to reverse the direction of the ideological revolution they had created. To be certain that that did not happen, they had to return to their ideological origins, rethink the principles that had guided them into and through the Revolution, refine them, modernize them, and then reapply them in this new situation. In the end they found themselves fulfilling their original goals by creating power, on new principles, not by destroying it.

  To probe this conclusive phase of the ideology of the Revolution in which the protean possibilities of the original ideas were deeply explored and daringly applied, I have expanded the original book by including a Postscript on the vast, sprawling, bitterly contentious debate on the ratification of the Constitution. Just as the original book was based on an examination of the corpus of writings, formal and informal, of those who undertook the Revolution, so this Postscript is a product of a close reading of the enormous documentation—the countless newspaper pieces, personal correspondences, state papers, and speeches pro and con in the ratifying conventions—produced in the tumultuous year when the fate of the Constitution hung in the balance.

  This nationwide debate, in which every community and every politically conscious person participated, was a sequel to everything that had come before and it was a preface to what was to follow. But while a new national power system emerged from this struggle, it does not mark a sudden break in the ideological history of our national origins. The powerful set of ideas, ideals, and political sensibilities that shaped the origins and early development of the Revolution did not drop dead with the Constitution. That document, in my view, does not mark a Thermidorean reaction to the idealism of the early period engineered by either a capitalist junta or the proponents of rule by a leisured patriciate; nor did the tenth Federalist paper mark the death knell of earlier political beliefs or introduce at a crack a new political science. Modifications in the basic doctrines had to be made to accommodate the urgencies that had arisen; fundamental beliefs had to be tested, refined, modernized, and ingeniously reapplied—but they were not repudiated. The Constitution created, of course, a potentially powerful central government, with powers that served certain economic groups particularly well, and this new government could be seen—as many antifederalists saw it—as just the kind of arbitrary, absolute, and concentrated power that the Revolution had set out to destroy. But in fact, as almost all the antifederalists sooner or later realized, especially when the guarantees of the Bill of Rights were in place, it was not. The earlier principles remained, though in new, more complicated forms, embodied in new institutions devised to perpetuate the received tradition into the modern world. The essential spirit of eighteenth-century reform—its idealism, its determination to free the individual from the power of the state, even a reformed state—lived on, and lives on still.

  B. B.

  1992

  FOREWORD TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

  This book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then Editor-in-Chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series. Like all students of American history I knew well perhaps a half dozen of the most famous pamphlets of the Revolution, obviously worth republication, and I knew also of others, another half dozen or so, that would probably be worth considering. The project was attractive to me, it did not appear to be particularly burdensome, and since in addition it was related to a book I was then preparing on eighteenth-century politics, I agreed to undertake it.

  The starting point of the work was the compilation of a complete bibliography of the pamphlets. This alone proved to be a considerable task, and it was in assembling this list that I discovered the magnitude of the project I had embarked on. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred; in the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be republished. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. The pamphlets include all sorts of writings—treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems—and they display all sorts of literary devices. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken; they reveal motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas—the articulated world view—that lay behind the manifest events of the time. As a result I found myself, as I read through these many documents, studying not simply a particular medium of publication but, through these documents, nothing less than the ideological origins of the American Revolution. And I found myself viewing these origins with surprise, for the “interior” view, from the vantage point of the pamphlets, was different from what I had expected. The task, consequently, took on an increasing excitement, for much of the history of the American Revolution has fallen into the condition that overtakes so many of the great events of the past; it is, as Professor Trevor-Roper has written in another connection, taken for granted: “By our explanations, interpretations, assumptions we gradually make it seem automatic, natural, inevitable; we remove from it the sense of wonder, the unpredictability, and therefore the freshness it ought to have.” Study of the pamphlets appeared to lead back into the unpredictable reality of the Revolution, and posed a variety of new problems of interpretation. More, it seemed to me, was called for in preparing this edition than simply reproducing accurately and annotating a selected group of texts.

  Study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or the economy. It confirmed too my belief that intellectual developments in the decade before Independenc
e led to a radical idealization and conceptualization of the previous century and a half of American experience, and that it was this intimate relationship between Revolutionary thought and the circumstances of life in eighteenth-century America that endowed the Revolution with its peculiar force and made it so profoundly a transforming event.1 But if the pamphlets confirmed this belief, they filled it with unexpected details and gave it new meaning. They shed new light on the question of the sources and character of Revolutionary thought. Most commonly the thought of the Revolution has been seen simply as an expression of the natural rights philosophy: the ideas of the social contract, inalienable rights, natural law, and the contractual basis of government. But some have denounced this interpretation as “obtuse secularism,” and, reading the sermons of the time with acute sensitivity, argue that it was only a respect for world opinion that led the Founders to put their case “in the restricted language of the rational century,” and that the success of the Revolutionary movement is comprehensible only in terms of the continuing belief in original sin and the need for grace. Yet others have described the sermons of the time as a form of deliberate propaganda by which revolutionary ideas were fobbed off on an unsuspecting populace by a “black regiment” of clergy committed, for reasons unexplained, to the idea of rebellion. And still others deny the influence of both Enlightenment theory and theology, and view the Revolution as no revolution at all, but rather as a conservative movement wrought by practitioners of the common law and devoted to preserving it, and the ancient liberties embedded in it, intact.