The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  the executive possesses means of distracting Parliament from its proper function; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers’ rivals, by persuading them to support measures — standing armies, national debts, excise schemes — whereby the activities of administration grow beyond Parliament’s control. These means of subversion are known collectively as corruption, and if ever Parliament or those who elect them — for corruption may occur at this point too — should be wholly corrupt, then there will be an end of independence and liberty.35

  This was their major theme, their obsessive concern, and they hammered away at it week after week, year after year, in ringing denunciations of Walpole’s manipulation of Parliament and of the dissoluteness of the age that permitted it. The outcries were as loud, the fear as deep, on the “left” of the opposition spectrum as on the “right.” So “Cato” warned, again and again, that

  public corruptions and abuses have grown upon us; fees in most, if not all, offices, are immensely increased; places and employments, which ought not to be sold at all, are sold for treble value; the necessities of the public have made greater impositions unavoidable, and yet the public has run very much in debt; and as those debts have been increasing, and the people growing poor, salaries have been augmented, and pensions multiplied.36

  Bolingbroke was even more insistent that England was faced with the age-old and associated dangers of ministerial usurpation and political corruption. And the prose of his jeremiads — echoed in the more artistic productions of the great Tory satirists of the age, in the writings of Swift, Pope, Gay, Mandeville, even in the less partisan, critical-patriotic rhapsodies of James Thomson, Liberty and Britannia37 — was even more vivid, more memorable than that of “Cato.” He devised a new terminology to describe the urgent danger. “Robinocracy,” he wrote, was what was developing under the “prime”-ministry (a term of derogation) of Robert Walpole. Robinocracy, he explained, was a form of government in which the chief minister maintained the façade of constitutional procedures while he in fact monopolized the whole of governmental power:

  The Robinarch, or chief ruler, is nominally a minister only and creature of the prince; but in reality he is a sovereign, as despotic, arbitrary a sovereign as this part of the world affords … The Robinarch … hath unjustly engrossed the whole power of a nation into his own hands … [and] admits no person to any considerable post of trust and power under him who is not either a relation, a creature, or a thorough-paced tool whom he can lead at pleasure into any dirty work without being able to discover his designs or the consequences of them.

  The modes of Robinarcal control of a once-free legislature were clear enough. The corrupt minister and his accomplices systematically encourage “luxury and extravagance, the certain forerunners of indigence, dependance, and servility.” Some deputies

  are tied down with honors, titles, and preferments, of which the Robinarch engrosses the disposal to himself, and others with bribes, which are called pensions in these countries. Some are persuaded to prostitute themselves for the lean reward of hopes and promises; and others, more senseless than all of them, have sacrificed their principles and consciences to a set of party names, without any meaning, or the vanity of appearing in favor at court.

  Once in power the Robinarcal ministry feeds on its own corruption. It loads the people with taxes and with debts, and ends by creating a mercenary army ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the people but in fact to perfect its dominance in just those ways, Bolingbroke wrote, that Trenchard had explained years before in his tracts on standing armies.38

  Solutions of different forms were advocated by “left” and “right”: the former urged those institutional, political, and legal reforms which would finally be realized a full century later in the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century; the latter argued the need for that romantic ideal, the Patriot Prince, who should govern as well as reign, yet govern above parties and factions, in harmony with a loyal and independent commons. But if their solutions were different their basic observations and the fears they expressed were identical. Everywhere, they agreed, there was corruption — corruption technically, in the adroit manipulation of Parliament by a power-hungry ministry, and corruption generally, in the self-indulgence, effeminizing luxury, and gluttonous pursuit of gain of a generation sunk in new and unaccustomed wealth. If nothing were done to stop the growth of these evils, England would follow so many other nations into a tyranny from which there would be no recovery.

  But if these dark thoughts, in the England of Walpole and Gibbon, attained popularity in certain opposition, radical, and nonconformist circles, they had relatively little political influence in the country at large. In the mainland colonies of North America, however, they were immensely popular and influential. There, an altered condition of life made what in England were considered to be extreme, dislocating ideas sound like simple statements of fact. There, the spread of independent landholding had insensibly created a broad electorate. There, the necessity of devising systems of representation at a stroke and the presence of persistent conflict between the legislatures and the executives had tended to make representation regular and responsible and had limited the manipulative influence of any group in power. There, the multiplicity of religious groupings, the need for continuous encouragement of immigration, and the distance from European centers of ecclesiastical authority had weakened the force of religious establishments below anything known in Europe. There the moral basis of a healthy, liberty-preserving polity seemed already to exist in the unsophisticated lives of the independent, uncorrupted, landowning yeoman farmers who comprised so large a part of the colonial population. Yet there the threat of ministerial aggrandizement seemed particularly pressing and realistic, for there, in all but the charter colonies, the executive branches of government — venal surrogates, it so often seemed, of ill-informed if not ill-disposed masters — held, and used, powers that in England had been stripped from the crown in the settlement that had followed the Glorious Revolution as inappropriate to the government of a free people.39

  In such a situation the writings of the English radical and opposition leaders seemed particularly reasonable, particularly relevant, and they quickly became influential. Everywhere groups seeking justification for concerted opposition to constituted governments turned to these writers. When in 1735 John Peter Zenger’s lawyer sought theoretical grounds for attacking the traditional concept of seditious libel, he turned for authority to Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters. When, four years later, an opposition writer in Massachusetts drew up an indictment of the governor so vehement the Boston printers would not publish it, he did so, he wrote, with “some helps from Cato’s Letters, which were wrote upon the glorious cause of liberty.” When in 1750 Jonathan Mayhew sought to work out, in his celebrated Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, a full rationale for resistance to constituted government, he drew on — indeed, cribbed wholesale — not Locke, whose ideas would scarcely have supported what he was saying, but a sermon of Benjamin Hoadly, from whom he borrowed not only ideas and phrases but, in abusing the nonjuror Charles Leslie, the Bishop’s enemies as well.40 When in 1752–1753 William Livingston and his friends undertook to publish in a series of periodical essays a sweeping critique of public life in New York, and in particular to assault the concept of a privileged state, they modeled their publication, The Independent Reflector, on Trenchard and Gordon’s Independent Whig, and borrowed from it specific formulations for their central ideas. And when in Massachusetts in 1754 opponents of a stringent excise act sought models for a campaign of opposition, they turned not only generally to the literature of opposition that had been touched off by Walpole’s excise proposal of 1733 but specifically to Bolingbroke’s Craftsman of that year, from which they freely copied arguments and slogans, even figures of speech.41 Everywhere in America the tradition that had originated in seventeenth-century radicalism and that had been passed on,
with elaborations and applications, by early eighteenth-century English opposition publicists and politicians brought forth congenial responses and provided grounds for opposition politics.

  But it did more. It provided also a harmonizing force for the other, discordant elements in the political and social thought of the Revolutionary generation. Within the framework of these ideas, Enlightenment abstractions and common law precedents, covenant theology and classical analogy — Locke and Abraham, Brutus and Coke — could all be brought together into a comprehensive theory of politics. It was in terms of this pattern of ideas and attitudes — originating in the English Civil War and carried forward with additions and modifications not on the surface of English political life but in its undercurrents stirred by doctrinaire libertarians, disaffected politicians, and religious dissenters — that the colonists responded to the new regulations imposed by England on her American colonies after 1763.

  1. Most notably in his Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great-Britain over the Colonies in America … (Philadelphia, 1774), reprinted in Pennsylvania Archives, 2d ser., III, 565 ff. See also Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s Observations on the … Boston Port-Bill; with Thoughts on … Standing Armies (Boston, 1774), reprinted in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun.… (Boston, 1825), pp. 355 ff.

  2. Charles F. Mullett, “Classical Influences on the American Revolution,” Classical Journal, 35 (1939–40), 93, 94. On the classics in general in colonial and Revolutionary America, see Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 1963); on the teaching of the classics in the secondary schools, see Robert Middlekauff, Ancients and Axioms (New Haven, 1963).

  3. Mullett, “Classical Influences,” pp. 93, 99; Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (New York, 1963), p. 10; Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill, 1959), II, 433, 437. Cf. Gummere, Classical Tradition, pp. 178–179.

  4. Mullett, “Classical Influences,” pp. 96 ff. Cf. Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago, 1937), pp. 22, 23.

  5. Adams, Diary and Autobiography, I, 63; Mullett, “Classical Influences,” p. 102; H. Trevor Colbourn, ed., “A Pennsylvania Farmer at the Court of King George: John Dickinson’s London Letters, 1754–1756,” Pa. Mag., 86 (1962), 268. Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, p. 435. American views of corruption in English life are described below, pp. 86–93, 130–138.

  6. James Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 7), pp. 9, 15, 22–23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 37; [James Otis], A Vindication of the British Colonies … (Boston, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 11), pp. 10–12; Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, pp. 394, 402, 404, 406, 415, 452; [Hamilton], The Farmer Refuted … (New York, 1775), reprinted in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Harold C. Syrett, et al., eds., New York and London, 1961–), I, 86.

  7. Thus Simeon Howard validates his offhand description of the state of nature with the footnote “See Locke on government.” A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery-Company … (Boston, 1773), p. 8.

  8. Hume was greatly respected in America, but his History of Great Britain, though often referred to, was commonly believed to be, in Daniel Dulany’s words, “a studied apology for the Stuarts, and particularly Charles I.” Elihu S. Riley, ed., Correspondence of “First Citizen” — Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and “Antilon” — Daniel Dulany, Jr.… (Baltimore, 1902), p. 191; see also note 25 below. On Bolingbroke, see below, and note 22; on Burlamaqui, see Ray F. Harvey, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, A Liberal Tradition in American Constitutionalism (Chapel Hill, 1937).

  9. On those universally despised apologists of Stuart authoritarianism, Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Mainwaring (Manwaring), minor figures of the time of Charles I made famous by the condemnations of Locke, Sidney, and the early eighteenth-century libertarians, see besides Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 696, and below, note 39, Francis D. Wormuth, The Royal Prerogative, 1603–1649 (Ithaca, 1939), pp. 16, 43, 93–98. The only sustained attack on Locke and systematic effort to justify Filmer in the Revolutionary literature appears to be Jonathan Boucher’s remarkable sermon of 1775, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance,” published in his View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution … (London, 1797), discussed at length below, chap. VI, sec. 4.

  10. [Mercy Otis Warren], The Group, A Farce … (Boston, 1775), reprinted in Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists … 1765–1819 (New York, 1918), p. 227; [James Chalmers], Plain Truth … Containing Remarks on … Common Sense … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 64), pp. 1–3, 67, 72; Henry C. Van Schaack, The Life of Peter Van Schaack (New York, 1842), pp. 58, 74, 72–73, 122; [Joseph Galloway], A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies … (New York, 1775), pp. 21–22 (see also 4–5, 8, 15, 17–18); [Charles Inglis], The True Interest of America … Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense … (Philadelphia, 1776), p. 22. For a particularly striking example of a favorable reference to Locke by a Tory who believed that “in the body politic all inferior jurisdictions should flow from one superior fountain,” see Isaac Hunt, The Political Family; or … the Reciprocal Advantages Which Flow from an Uninterrupted Union Between Great-Britain and Her American Colonies (Philadelphia, 1775), pp. 6, 7.

  11. On Coke, see Charles F. Mullett, “Coke and the American Revolution,” Economica, 12 (1932), 457–471. Of the other jurists mentioned (on whom see Index listings in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I), Hale was a particularly well-known and attractive figure; the Newport Mercury, for example, ran a biography of him, January 23 and 30, 1764.

  12. See Introduction to Otis’ Rights of the British Colonies (JHL 7), in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I.

  13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957), p. 31, chap. viii; David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (rev. ed., London, 1951), chaps. vi, xi. For instances of the use of the seventeenth-century scholars by the American pamphleteers, see, besides references indexed in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, Maurice Moore, The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies … (Wilmington, N. C., 1765: JHL Pamphlet 16), p. 3; Richard Bland, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies … (Williamsburg, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 17), pp. 7, 22; and Riley, Correspondence of “First Citizen” … and “Antilon,” pp. 84–85, 193, 231–232.

  14. Perry Miller, “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in The Shaping of American Religion (James W. Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., Religion in American Life, I, Princeton, 1961), pp. 322–334.

  15. E.g., Benjamin Trumbull, A Discourse Delivered at … the Town of New-Haven … (New Haven, 1773), pp. 7–8; Dan Foster, A Short Essay on Civil Government, the Substance of Six Sermons … (Hartford, 1775), pp. 23, 61. Miller, “From the Covenant to the Revival,” p. 340.

  16. George Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, 1964), chaps. ii, iii; on Milton cf., e.g., Howard, Sermon, p. 28; Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, p. 411; and the Hollis-Mayhew and Hollis-Eliot exchanges, in MHS Procs., 69 (1956), 116, 117, 125, and MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 403, 412–413. On Harrington, see especially J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 22 (1965), 549–583; also, H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and His Oceana: … and Its Influence in America (Cambridge, England, 1914), chaps. vii, viii; cf., e.g., Otis, Rights of the British Colonies (JHL 7), p. 15 and text note 6; John Adams (“Novanglus”), in Works, IV, 103–105. On Sidney, see Caroline Robbins, “Algernon Sidney’s Discourses…,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 4 (1947), 267–296; and cf., e.g., [Stephen Hopkins], The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 9), p. 4; William Stearns, A View of the Controversy … (Watertown, 1775), p. 18; Adams (“Novanglus”), in Works, IV, 80 ff.

  17. Charles B. Realey, The London Journal and Its Authors, 1720–1723 (Bulletin of the University of Kansas, XXXVI, no. 23, Dec. 1, 1935), pp. 1–34; J. M. Bulloch, Thomas Gord
on, the “Independent Whig” (Aberdeen, 1918); William T. Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1936), pp. 237–269; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 115–125, 392–393.

  18. On Trenchard and Walter Moyle’s influential Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government … (London, 1697), see, generally, Lois G. Schwoerer, “The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy, 1697–1699,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 28 (1965), 189 ff.; on its ideological force, see Pocock, “English Political Ideologies,” esp. p. 566; and below, pp. 61–63, 116.

  19. Elizabeth C. Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750 (New York, 1912), pp. 81–83, 89, 125–126, 129, 137, 139, 159, 257, 265. On the Quaker merchants’ interest in these writers, see Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House (Chapel Hill, 1948), pp. 178–179. On their influence on William Livingston and others in New York, see William Livingston, et al., The Independent Reflector … (Milton M. Klein, ed., Cambridge, 1963), pp. 21–28, 365, 450–452. For examples of the use of Cato’s Letters by the American pamphleteers, besides those that appear below and that are indexed in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, see [Joseph Galloway], A True and Impartial State of the Province of Pennsylvania … (Philadelphia, 1759), title page; H. Trevor Colbourn, “The Historical Perspective of John Dickinson,” Early Dickinsoniana (The Boyd Lee Spahr Lectures in Americana, Dickinson College, 1951–1961, Carlisle, Pa., 1961), pp. 13, 14, 18; Jonathan Mayhew to Thomas Hollis, August 19, 1765, MHS Procs., 69 (1956), 176; [John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania … (Philadelphia, 1768: JHL Pamphlet 23), p. 28n; Chalmers, Plain Truth (JHL 64), p. 72. On the importance of Cato’s Letters in the political controversies of the early and mid-eighteenth century, see Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), pp. 54, 117, 137, 141, 143–144.