20. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876), II, 152. Hoadly has yet to be excavated from the scorn and abuse Stephen heaped on him, but some indication of his importance emerges from Norman Sykes’s essay in F. J. C. Hearnshaw, ed., Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers … 1650–1750 (London, 1928), chap. vi. Hoadly’s significantly ambiguous relationship to the government under George II, especially his value as the administration’s go-between with the dissenting interests, is revealed in detail in the memoirs of his friend John, Lord Hervey, edited by Romney Sedgwick as Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II … (London, 1931), I, 123 ff., 190–92; II, 394–99, 498–500; III, 794–95. For illustrations of the way Hoadly’s ideas entered into the mainstream of American Revolutionary thought, see Jonathan Mayhew’s Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (Boston, 1750: JHL Pamphlet 1), Introduction and notes 11 and 12, in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I; [William Livingston?], The Occasional Reverberator, September 14, 1753; [John Allen], The American Alarm … for the Rights, and Liberties, of the People … (Boston, 1773: JHL Pamphlet 39), 4th sec., p. 10; Gad Hitchcock, A Sermon Preached before … Gage … (Boston, 1774), pp. 23, 27; Howard, Sermon, p. 23; [John Dickinson], “Letters to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies,” in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson (Memoir of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, XIV, Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 494–496n; and R. C. Nicholas’ reply to “Hoadleianus” in Virginia Gazette (R), June 10, 1773. There is perhaps no better testimony to Hoadly’s role in the growth of a Revolutionary frame of mind than the recollection of the arch-Tory Jonathan Boucher, who, hearing that a rival preacher proposed to deliver a sermon against absolute monarchy, concluded that he must have “found such a sermon in Hoadly, and having transcribed it, showed it to the Committee, by whom it was approved, as any and every thing was and would have been, however loose and weak, that but seemed to be against power and for liberty.” Jonathan Bouchier, ed., Reminiscences of an American Loyalist … (Boston and New York, 1925), p. 120. Similarly, an anonymous English writer at the end of the century attributed the origins of the French Revolution to the fact that “every class of Frenchman … became familiarly acquainted with Sidney, Locke, and Hoadly.” An Historical View of the French Revolution … (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1796), p. 18. (I owe this reference to Mr. John Dunn.) From the earliest years of the century the public prints had depicted Hoadly as “the embodiment of faction, rebellion, and profane Latitudinarianism”: M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792 (Oxford, 1959), I, 68.
21. On Molesworth, see Robbins, Commonwealthman, chap. iv, pp. 393–394; and Realey, London Journal, pp. 4–5. Cf. Newport Mercury, July 30, 1764; John Dickinson, A Speech Delivered in the House of Assembly … 1764 (Philadelphia, 1764), in Ford, Writings, p. 24; Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, 1926), pp. 212–213, 225–226; Arthur Lee, An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain … (New York, 1775), p. 32.
22. On Bolingbroke, whose Freeholder’s Political Catechism (1733), which originally appeared in the pages of The Craftsman, was reprinted in Boston in 1757 and in New London in 1769 and whose Works John Adams professed to have read through five times, see, e.g., Colbourn, “Historical Perspective,” p. 11; “Dickinson’s London Letters,” pp. 246–247; H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 84, 85, 87, 90, 123, 124, 128, 159; Newport Mercury, July 30, 1764; Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, p. 386. For a particularly dramatic illustration of the direct use of The Craftsman in mid-century America, see Paul S. Boyer, “Borrowed Rhetoric: The Massachusetts Excise Controversy of 1754,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 21 (1964), 328–351. Bolingbroke’s importance in the shaping of eighteenth-century opposition ideology has only recently been appreciated, notably by Pocock in “English Political Ideologies,” pp. 552, 572, 578, and by Isaac Kramnick in Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, 1968). The overlap of Bolingbroke’s arguments and attitudes with those of the extreme libertarians continued through the century: just as Bolingbroke had quoted Trenchard on the necessary independence of the House of Commons and “Cato’s immortal Letters” on a wide range of topics (Craftsman, nos. 198, 179, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275 [“Cato’s Letters and the Writings of the Craftsman Compared”], 278, 288, 292, 303, 356, 372, 403, 407), so James Burgh quoted him in his Political Disquisitions (1774: reprinted in Philadelphia, 1775) as he had in his Britain’s Remembrancer: or, The Danger Not Over (1746: reprinted in Philadelphia, 1747 and 1748; in Boston, 1759), and thus conveyed his thought in a radical context to an eager colonial audience. Americans had long been habituated to think of Bolingbroke in a libertarian context. Passages from his Dissertation on Parties, for example (“the most masterly performance that ever was wrote upon the British constitution”), were used in Maryland in 1748 to gloss Locke’s theory of the contract basis of government. The Maryland Gazette Extraordinary; An Appendix to No. 162, June 4, 1748, p. 3. Cf. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 23, 50; and Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, pp. 140–141.
23. All of these figures are discussed in Robbins’ Commonwealthman, but on the link to America the same author’s essay on Hutcheson in W.M.Q., 3d ser., 11 (1954), 214–251, is especially important.
24. On Baron and Hollis, see Mayhew, Discourse (JHL 1), Introduction and references in notes 16 and 17. The Mayhew-Hollis correspondence is published in MHS Procs., 69 (1956), 102–193; the Eliot-Hollis correspondence is in MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 399–461. The later radicals are discussed in Robbins’ Commonwealthman; but see particularly Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, “James Burgh and American Revolutionary Theory,” MHS Procs., 73 (1961), 38–57; Nicholas Hans, “Franklin, Jefferson, and the English Radicals at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 98 (1954), 406–426; and Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London, 1962), chaps. i–iii.
25. “Rapin … in my opinion … carries the palm among the writers of our story, and wants nothing but a reduction of his enormous bulk to about half the present size, and to have his language a little enlivened … to render him an inestimable treasure of knowledge”: William Livingston to Noah Welles, August 18, 1759, quoted by Klein in Livingston, Independent Reflector, p. 284. For indications of Rapin’s great popularity in the colonies, see, besides the passages indexed in Colbourn’s Lamp of Experience, H. Trevor Colbourn, “John Dickinson, Historical Revolutionary,” Pa. Mag., 83 (1959), 277, 281, 282, 289; “Dickinson’s London Letters,” pp. 448–449; Dickinson, Farmer’s Letters (JHL 23), pp. 60, 62. [James Wilson], Considerations on the … Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 44), p. 5; John Lathrop, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery-Company … (Boston, 1774), p. 20; [John Joachim Zubly], Calm and Respectful Thoughts on the Negative of the Crown … [Savannah, 1772], p. 14. For Jefferson’s admiration of Rapin, whom a contemporary of Bolingbroke called “The Craftsman’s own political evangelist” (John, Lord Hervey, Ancient and Modern Liberty …, London, 1734, p. 51) and his widely shared dislike of Hume’s History, see E. M. Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C., 1952–1959), I, 156–157, and Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 177, 179, 181, 86, 104; cf. Dulany’s opinion of Hume, note 8 above. For a revealing and characteristic use of Rapin by John Adams, see Works, III, 543. Rapin’s Dissertation is an effort to explain the party structure under George I as the logical outcome of England’s entire ideological and constitutional history; its stress on the “formed design” of the Tories to restore Stuart absolutism to the throne made it, for reasons explained in Chapter IV below, of particular relevance to American Revolutionary thought. The characterization of Mrs. Macaulay’s History is from Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, p. 17; for examples of the colonists’ enthusiasm for the book, see Mayhew’s and Washington’s rhapsodies, the former in a letter to Hol
lis, August 8, 1765, in MHS Procs., 69 (1956), 173, the latter in direct correspondence with Mrs. Macaulay, quoted in Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 153–154.
26. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, p. 189. For examples of the use of these translations, see [Stephen Hopkins’] compliment to the “fine English” of Gordon’s Tacitus, in his letter to Goddard, Providence Gazette, April 8, 1765; Charles Carroll, in Riley, Correspondence of “First Citizen” … and “Antilon,” p. 48; Colbourn, “Dickinson, Historical Revolutionary,” p. 280; H. Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” W.M.Q. 3d ser., 15 (1958), 61–62; Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, pp. 443, 444. See also, David L. Jacobson, “Thomas Gordon’s Works of Tacitus in Pre-Revolutionary America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 69 (1965), 58–64.
27. New England Courant, October 2–9, 9–16, 16–23, 23–30, 1721. The ten paragraphs quoted in Silence Dogood no. 8 (July 9, 1722) as well as the two quoted in no. 9 (July 23) were copied by Franklin from Cato’s Letters, nos. 15 and 31. (I owe this information to Mr. Max Hall.) See Leonard W. Labaree, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, 1959–), I, 27–32.
28. Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House (New York, 1963 ed.), p. 179. On the New York Weekly Journal’s use of Trenchard and Gordon, see, e.g., the issues of February 4 and December 10, 1733.
29. [Daniel Dulany, Sr.], The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws (Annapolis, 1728: reprinted in St. George L. Sioussat, The English Statutes in Maryland, Baltimore, 1903), pp. [i], 7, 10, 19. For further identification of Dulany’s sources, which include Henry Care’s perennially popular English Liberties … (London, [1680?]), a combination casebook in law, guide to legal procedures, and Anglophile propaganda piece, the fifth edition of which was reprinted in Boston by James Franklin in 1721, and the sixth in Providence in 1774, see Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 742–743.
30. On the complex political history of the play in England, see John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford, 1963), esp. pp. 57–62; on its enthusiastic reception as a libertarian document in America, where it was reprinted four times after 1766, see Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 24, 153. For characteristic uses of the play in political polemics, see New York Weekly Journal, January 28, 1733, and the untitled three-page squib, prefaced and concluded by quotations from the play, on the dangers threatening the New York legislature from the governor’s “prudent application of posts and pensions” (Evans 3595 [New York, 1732]).
31. W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics … 1500–1700 (London, 1964), p. 12: “The great books of an age, it may be suggested, are never fully intelligible without an acquaintance with their intellectual background, with … ‘the great hinterland’ of belief. To understand these notions, which men often saw little need to explain because they were so obvious, means a familiarity with more ordinary opinions whatever their coherence or logical status in modern eyes.”
32. Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken … (Boston, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 20), p. 35; John Adams, Thoughts on Government … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 65), p. 7; Adams, Works, VI, 4; Quincy, Memoir, p. 350.
33. So too the New York Tory William Smith, Jr., declared, “I am a Whig of the old stamp. No Roundhead — one of King William’s Whigs, for Liberty and the Constitution.” William H. W. Sabine, ed., Historical Memoirs … 1776 to … 1778 … of William Smith … (New York, 1958), p. 278. The earlier quotations in the paragraph are from Alan D. McKillop’s revealing study “The Background of Thomson’s Liberty,” The Rice Institute Pamphlet, XXXVIII, no. 2 (July 1951), 87, 92, where it is argued that “It can hardly be said that one party in this age is for Gothic liberty, the other against it, any more than it can be said that one coherent group opposed or defended luxury. But it came to be the Opposition, the shifting coalition of Tories and dissident Whigs, that stressed the danger to England’s ancient heritage and the loss of pristine virtue; and it was the apologists for Walpole who at this point were likely to belittle primordial liberty in comparison with England’s gains since 1688.” For further discussion of this monograph — the most sensitive effort yet made, as far as the present writer is aware, to distinguish opposition themes from the mainstream tradition of eighteenth-century political thought — see note 37 below.
34. See below, pp. 283–284.
35. Pocock, “English Political Ideologies,” p. 565.
36. Cato’s Letters, no. 20, March 11, 1720 (in the London, 1748 ed., I, 140). See also, e.g., no. 17, February 18, 1720 (“What Measures Are Actually Taken by Wicked and Desperate Ministers to Ruin and Enslave Their Country”), and no. 98, October 13, 1722.
37. For the broad literary context of Bolingbroke’s pessimism, see particularly Louis I. Bredvold, “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists,” in James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa, eds., Pope and His Contemporaries (Oxford, 1949); see also Bonamy Dobrée, The Theme of Patriotism in the Poetry of the Early Eighteenth Century (London, 1949). Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), a vast, unreadable autobiography of the goddess of that name, detailing the long history of her ancient greatness, her decline in “Gothic darkness,” and her ultimate revival in Hanoverian England, proves, in the excellent analysis by Alan McKillop (cited in note 33 above), to be of the greatest importance in the ideological history of the eighteenth century. For not only does this “sweeping synthesis or elaborate piece of syncretism” expose the great array of sources that fed the early eighteenth-century ideas of liberty, but it demonstrates the degree of deviation from the normal pattern that opposition thought involved as it traces the shifts that took place in Thomson’s views in the course of writing the poem — from confidence in English politics to concern, from support of the administration to opposition — and that are reflected in it. For the text of Britannia (1729), in which Thomson “had already made the transition from ‘pointing with pride’ to ‘viewing with alarm,’” and for a commentary on it, see McKillop’s edition of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence and Other Poems (Lawrence, Kansas, 1961); see also John E. Wells, “Thomson’s Britannia…,” Modern Philology, 40 (1942–43), 43–56. For references to Liberty in the Revolutionary pamphlets, see Index listings in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I.
38. The Craftsman, nos. 172, October 18, 1729; and 198, April 18, 1730 (in the London, 1731 ed., V, 152–153, 155, 156; VI, 138 ff.).
39. The argument that English opposition theory had a special utility and unique attractiveness in early- and mid-eighteenth-century America as a result of the existence of an archaic preponderance of executive power coupled with an almost total elimination of the kind of political “influence” that Walpole was able to exert over opposition forces in Parliament, I have developed in The Origins of American Politics.
40. Trenchard and Gordon helped similarly to transmit to the Revolutionary generation the reputations of the more notorious clerical absolutists and the belief that “priestcraft and tyranny are ever inseparable, and go hand-in-hand.” For their condemnation of Leslie, and of Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Mainwaring, chaplains to Charles I who advocated passive obedience to royal authority and threatened damnation to opponents of crown taxation, see Cato’s Letters, nos. 128, May 11, 1723; and 130, May 25, 1723 (in the London, 1775 ed., IV, 192, 213).
41. Leonard W. Levy, Legacy of Suppression (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 115–121, 129–137; Stanley N. Katz, ed., A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 15, 9, 10. [Americanus, pseud.], A Letter to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Massachusetts-Bay … ([Newport], 1739), p. 1. Mayhew’s use of Hoadly’s Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrates is detailed in the Introduction to his Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (JHL 1) in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I. On Livingston’s reliance on Trenchard and Gordon, see Klein’s comments in Livingston, Independent Reflector, pp. 21–28, 450–452; and Livingston’s quotation, p. 365. On The Craftsman and the Massachusetts excise controversy, see Boyer, “Borrowed Rhetor
ic,” cited in note 22 above.
Chapter III
POWER AND LIBERTY: A THEORY OF POLITICS
In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness.
— James Madison, 1792
THE THEORY of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power. The acuteness of the colonists’ sense of this problem is, for the twentieth-century reader, one of the most striking things to be found in this eighteenth-century literature: it serves to link the Revolutionary generation to our own in the most intimate way.
The colonists had no doubt about what power was and about its central, dynamic role in any political system. Power was not to be confused, James Otis pointed out, with unspecified physical capacity — with the “mere physical quality” described in physics. The essence of what they meant by power was perhaps best revealed inadvertently by John Adams as he groped for words in drafting his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law. Twice choosing and then rejecting the word “power,” he finally selected as the specification of the thought he had in mind “dominion,” and in this association of words the whole generation concurred. “Power” to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion.1 And it was, consequently, for them as it is for us “a richly connotative word”: some of its fascination may well have lain for them, as it has been said to lie for us, in its “sado-masochistic flavor,”2 for they dwelt on it endlessly, almost compulsively; it is referred to, discussed, dilated on at length and in similar terms by writers of all backgrounds and of all positions in the Anglo-American controversy.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 9