24. Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, 67 (1961–62), 339–351.
25. Diary and Autobiography, I, 282.
Chapter II
SOURCES AND TRADITIONS
I give to my son, when he shall arrive to the age of fifteen years, Algernon Sidney’s works, — John Locke’s works, — Lord Bacon’s works, — Gordon’s Tacitus, — and Cato’s Letters. May the spirit of liberty rest upon him!
— Last Will and Testament of Josiah Quincy, Jr., 1774
THE INTELLECTUAL history of the years of crisis from 1763 to 1776 is the story of the clarification and consolidation under the pressure of events of a view of the world and of America’s place in it only partially seen before. Elements of this picture had long been present in the colonies — some dated from as far back as the settlements themselves — but they had existed in balance, as it were, with other, conflicting views. Expressed mainly on occasions of controversy, they had appeared most often as partisan arguments, without unique appeal, status, or claim to legitimacy. Then, in the intense political heat of the decade after 1763, these long popular, though hitherto inconclusive ideas about the world and America’s place in it were fused into a comprehensive view, unique in its moral and intellectual appeal. It is the development of this view to the point of overwhelming persuasiveness to the majority of American leaders and the meaning this view gave to the events of the time, and not simply an accumulation of grievances, that explains the origins of the American Revolution. For this peculiar configuration of ideas constituted in effect an intellectual switchboard wired so that certain combinations of events would activate a distinct set of signals — danger signals, indicating hidden impulses and the likely trajectory of events impelled by them. Well before 1776 the signals registered on this switchboard led to a single, unmistakable conclusion — a conclusion that had long been feared and to which there could be only one rational response.
What were the sources of this world view? From whom, from what, were the ideas and attitudes derived?
Study of the sources of the colonists’ thought as expressed in the informal as well as the formal documents, in the private as well as the public utterances, and above all in the discursive, explanatory pamphlets, reveals, at first glance, a massive, seemingly random eclecticism. To judge simply from an enumeration of the colonists’ citations, they had at their finger tips, and made use of, a large portion of the inheritance of Western culture, from Aristotle to Molière, from Cicero to “Philoleutherus Lipsiensis” [Richard Bentley], from Vergil to Shakespeare, Ramus, Pufendorf, Swift, and Rousseau. They liked to display authorities for their arguments, citing and quoting from them freely; at times their writings become almost submerged in annotation: in certain of the writings of John Dickinson the text disappears altogether in a sea of footnotes and footnotes to footnotes.1 But ultimately this profusion of authorities is reducible to a few, distinct groups of sources and intellectual traditions dominated and harmonized into a single whole by the influence of one peculiar strain of thought, one distinctive tradition.
Most conspicuous in the writings of the Revolutionary period was the heritage of classical antiquity. Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education, and references to them and their works abound in the literature. From the grammar schools, from the colleges, from private tutors and independent reading came a general familiarity with and the habit of reference to the ancient authors and the heroic personalities and events of the ancient world. “Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Lucian, Dio, Polybius, Plutarch, and Epictetus, among the Greeks; and Cicero, Horace, Vergil, Tacitus, Lucan, Seneca, Livy, Nepos, Sallust, Ovid, Lucretius, Cato, Pliny, Juvenal, Curtius, Marcus Aurelius, Petronius, Suetonius, Caesar, the lawyers Ulpian and Gaius, and Justinian, among the Romans” — all are cited in the Revolutionary literature; many are directly quoted. “It was an obscure pamphleteer indeed who could not muster at least one classical analogy or one ancient precept.”2
But this elaborate display of classical authors is deceptive. Often the learning behind it was superficial; often the citations appear to have been dragged in as “window dressing with which to ornament a page or a speech and to increase the weight of an argument,” for classical quotation, as Dr. Johnson said, was “the parole of literary men all over the world.” So Jonathan Mayhew casually lumped Plato with Demosthenes and Cicero as the ancients who in his youth had initiated him “in the doctrines of civil liberty”; Oxenbridge Thacher too thought Plato had been a liberty-loving revolutionary, while Jefferson, who actually read the Dialogues, discovered in them only the “sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities” of a “foggy mind” — an idea concurred in with relief by John Adams, who in 1774 had cited Plato as an advocate of equality and self-government but who was so shocked when he finally studied the philosopher that he concluded that the Republic must have been meant as a satire.3
Yet Jefferson was a careful reader of the classics, and others too — James Otis, for example, who wrote treatises on Latin and Greek prosody — were thorough scholars of the ancient texts. What is basically important in the Americans’ reading of the ancients is the high selectivity of their real interests and the limitation of the range of their effective knowledge. For though the colonists drew their citations from all portions of the literature of the ancient world, their detailed knowledge and engaged interest covered only one era and one small group of writers. What gripped their minds, what they knew in detail, and what formed their view of the whole of the ancient world was the political history of Rome from the conquests in the east and the civil wars in the early first century B.C. to the establishment of the empire on the ruins of the republic at the end of the second century A.D. For their knowledge of this period they had at hand, and needed only, Plutarch, Livy, and above all Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus — writers who had lived either when the republic was being fundamentally challenged or when its greatest days were already past and its moral and political virtues decayed. They had hated and feared the trends of their own time, and in their writing had contrasted the present with a better past, which they endowed with qualities absent from their own, corrupt era. The earlier age had been full of virtue: simplicity, patriotism, integrity, a love of justice and of liberty; the present was venal, cynical, and oppressive.4
For the colonists, arguing the American cause in the controversies of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the analogies to their own times were compelling. They saw their own provincial virtues — rustic and old-fashioned, sturdy and effective — challenged by the corruption at the center of power, by the threat of tyranny, and by a constitution gone wrong. They found their ideal selves, and to some extent their voices, in Brutus, in Cassius, and in Cicero, whose Catilinarian orations the enraptured John Adams, aged 23, declaimed aloud, alone at night in his room. They were simple, stoical Catos, desperate, self-sacrificing Brutuses, silver-tongued Ciceros, and terse, sardonic Tacituses eulogizing Teutonic freedom and denouncing the decadence of Rome. England, the young John Dickinson wrote from London in 1754, is like Sallust’s Rome: “‘Easy to be bought, if there was but a purchaser.’” Britain, it would soon become clear, was to America “what Caesar was to Rome.”5
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. They heightened the colonists’ sensitivity to ideas and attitudes otherwise derived.
More directly influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generation were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism — writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.
> Despite the efforts that have been made to discount the influence of the “glittering generalities” of the European Enlightenment on eighteenth-century Americans, their influence remains, and is profusely illustrated in the political literature. It is not simply that the great virtuosi of the American Enlightenment — Franklin, Adams, Jefferson — cited the classic Enlightenment texts and fought for the legal recognition of natural rights and for the elimination of institutions and practices associated with the ancien régime. They did so; but they were not alone. The ideas and writings of the leading secular thinkers of the European Enlightenment — reformers and social critics like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Beccaria as well as conservative analysts like Montesquieu — were quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness. In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract, Montesquieu and later Delolme on the character of British liberty and on the institutional requirements for its attainment, Voltaire on the evils of clerical oppression, Beccaria on the reform of criminal law, Grotius, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel on the laws of nature and of nations, and on the principles of civil government.
The pervasiveness of such citations is at times astonishing. In his two most prominent pamphlets James Otis cited as authorities, and quoted at length, Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, and Pufendorf, and denounced spokesmen, such as Filmer, for more traditional ideas of political authority. Josiah Quincy, Jr., referred with approval to a whole library of enlightened authors, among them Beccaria, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the historian Robertson; and the young Alexander Hamilton, seeking to score points against his venerable antagonist, Samuel Seabury, recommended with arch condescension that his adversary get himself at the first opportunity to some of the writings of Pufendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlamaqui to discover the true principles of politics. Examples could be multiplied almost without end. Citations, respectful borrowings from, or at least references to, the eighteenth-century European illuminati are everywhere in the pamphlets of Revolutionary America.6
The citations are plentiful, but the knowledge they reflect, like that of the ancient classics, is at times superficial. Locke is cited often with precision on points of political theory, but at other times he is referred to in the most offhand way, as if he could be relied on to support anything the writers happened to be arguing.7 Bolingbroke and Hume are at times lumped together with radical reformers, and secondary figures like Burlamaqui are treated on a level with Locke.8 Nor were the critical, reforming writings of the Enlightenment, even some of the most radical, used exclusively by the left wing of the Revolutionary movement. Everyone, whatever his position on Independence or his judgment of Parliament’s actions, cited them as authoritative; almost no one, Whig or Tory, disputed them or introduced them with apology. Writers the colonists took to be opponents of Enlightenment rationalism — primarily Hobbes, Filmer, Sibthorpe, Mandeville, and Mainwaring — were denounced as frequently by loyalists as by patriots; but almost never, before 1776, were Locke, Montesquieu, Vattel, Beccaria, Burlamaqui, Voltaire, or even Rousseau.9 Mercy Otis Warren listed the contents of a hypothetical Tory library in her play The Group; but with the exception of Filmer none of the authors she mentions there were in fact referred to favorably by the Tories. James Chalmers, the Maryland loyalist, attacked Paine not with Hobbes, Sibthorpe, Wedderburn’s speeches, and the statutes of Henry VIII, which, according to Mrs. Warren, he should have done, but with Montesquieu, Hutcheson, even Voltaire and Rousseau. The New York loyalist Peter Van Schaack reached his decision to oppose Independence on the basis of a close and sympathetic reading of Locke, Vattel, Montesquieu, Grotius, Beccaria, and Pufendorf, and in 1777 justified his defiance of the state of New York with reference to “the sentiments of Mr. Locke and those other advocates for the rights of mankind whose principles have been avowed and in some instances carried into practice by the congress.” The Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway also cited Locke and Pufendorf as readily as his antagonists did; and when Charles Inglis looked for the source of Paine’s anti-monarchism in order to attack it, he found it not in Enlightenment theory, whose exponents he praised, but in an obscure treatise by one John Hall, “pensioner under Oliver Cromwell.”10
Referred to on all sides, by writers of all political viewpoints in the colonies, the major figures of the European Enlightenment and many of the lesser, contributed substantially to the thought of the Americans; but except for Locke’s, their influence, though more decisive than that of the authors of classical antiquity, was neither clearly dominant nor wholly determinative.
Also prominent and in certain ways powerfully influential was yet another group of writers and ideas. Just as the colonists cited with enthusiasm the theorists of universal reason, so too did they associate themselves, with offhand familiarity, with the tradition of the English common law. The great figures of England’s legal history, especially the seventeenth-century common lawyers, were referred to repeatedly — by the colonial lawyers above all, but by others as well. Sir Edward Coke is everywhere in the literature: “Coke upon Littleton,” “my Lord Coke’s Reports,” “Lord Coke’s 2nd Institute” — the citations are almost as frequent as, and occasionally even less precise than, those to Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. The earlier commentators Bracton and Fortescue are also referred to, casually, as authorities, as are Coke’s contemporary Francis Bacon, and his successors as Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir John Vaughan, and Sir John Holt.11 In the later years of the Revolutionary period, Blackstone’s Commentaries and the opinions of Chief Justice Camden became standard authorities. Throughout the literature, trial reports — Raymond’s, Salkeld’s, Williams’, Goldsboro’s — are referred to, and use is made of standard treatises on English law: Sullivan’s Lectures on the Laws of England; Gilbert’s Law of Evidence; Foster’s Crown Law; Barrington’s Observations on the More Ancient Statutes.
The common law was manifestly influential in shaping the awareness of the Revolutionary generation. But, again, it did not in itself determine the kinds of conclusions men would draw in the crisis of the time. Otis and Hutchinson both worshiped Coke, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the great chief justice, they read significantly different meanings into his opinion in Bonham’s Case.12 The law was no science of what to do next. To the colonists it was a repository of experience in human dealings embodying the principles of justice, equity, and rights; above all, it was a form of history — ancient, indeed immemorial, history; constitutional and national history; and, as history, it helped explain the movement of events and the meaning of the present. Particularly revealing, therefore, though vague in their intent, are the references in the pamphlets to the seventeenth-century scholars of the law, especially of the history of the law, whose importance in the development of English historical thought we have only recently become aware: Henry Spelman, Thomas Madox, Robert Brady, and William Petyt. English law — as authority, as legitimizing precedent, as embodied principle, and as the framework of historical understanding — stood side by side with Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the Revolutionary generation.13
Still another tradition, another group of writers and texts, that emerges from the political literature as a major source of ideas and attitudes of the Revolutionary generation stemmed ultimately from the political and social theories of New England Puritanism, and particularly from the ideas associated with covenant theology. For the elaborate system of thought erected by the first leaders of settlement in New England had been consolidated and amplified by a succession of writers in the course of the seventeenth century, channeled into the main stream of eighteenth-century political and social thinking by a generation of enlightened preachers, and softened in its denominational rigor by many hands until it could be received, with minor variations, by almost the entire spectrum of American Protestantism.14
In one sense this was the most limited and parochial tradition that contributed in an import
ant way to the writings of the Revolution, for it drew mainly from local sources and, whatever the extent of its newly acquired latitudinarianism, was yet restricted in its appeal to those who continued to understand the world, as the original Puritans had, in theological terms. But in another sense it contained the broadest ideas of all, since it offered a context for everyday events nothing less than cosmic in its dimensions. It carried on into the eighteenth century and into the minds of the Revolutionaries the idea, originally worked out in the sermons and tracts of the settlement period, that the colonization of British America had been an event designed by the hand of God to satisfy his ultimate aims. Reinvigorated in its historical meaning by newer works like Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1732–1738), his History of New England (1720), and Thomas Prince’s uncompleted Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals (1736), this influential strain of thought, found everywhere in the eighteenth-century colonies, stimulated confidence in the idea that America had a special place, as yet not fully revealed, in the architecture of God’s intent. “Imparting a sense of crisis by revivifying Old Testament condemnations of a degenerate people,” it prepared the colonists for a convulsive realization by locating their parochial concerns at a critical juncture on the map of mankind’s destiny. Their own history, it was clear, would provide the climax for those remarkable “Connections” from which they liked to quote, Samuel Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected (which contains a map fixing the exact geographical location of the garden of Eden) and Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected.15
But important as all of these clusters of ideas were, they did not in themselves form a coherent intellectual pattern, and they do not exhaust the elements that went into the making of the Revolutionary frame of mind. There were among them, in fact, striking incongruities and contradictions. The common lawyers the colonists cited, for example, sought to establish right by appeal to precedent and to an unbroken tradition evolving from time immemorial, and they assumed, if they did not argue, that the accumulation of the ages, the burden of inherited custom, contained within it a greater wisdom than any man or group of men could devise by the power of reason. Nothing could have been more alien to the Enlightenment rationalists whom the colonists also quoted — and with equal enthusiasm. These theorists felt that it was precisely the heavy crust of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man; they sought to throw it off and to create by the unfettered power of reason a framework of institutions superior to the accidental inheritance of the past. And the covenant theologians differed from both in continuing to assume the ultimate inability of man to improve his condition by his own powers and in deriving the principles of politics from divine intent and from the network of obligations that bound redeemed man to his maker.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 6