This basic concept of human nature, which would attain its greatest fame in the Federalist, appears full blown in the colonies well before the Revolutionary years, and may be traced back, intact, to the early eighteenth-century transmitters of English opposition thought. Thus, in words that may be found duplicated almost endlessly in the public prints of the mid-century, a writer in the New York Mercury, March 24, 1755, wrote: “A lust of domination is more or less natural to all parties; and hence the stupidity of entrusting any set of people with more power than necessity requires. Ambition and a thirst for sway are so deeply implanted in the human mind that one degree of elevation serves only as a step by which to ascend the next; nor can they ever mount the ladder so high as not to find the top still equally remote.” The passage is indistinguishable from any number of discussions of the same topic in Cato’s Letters (e.g., nos. 31, 39, 40, 43, 44, 134), and in the writings of the later English radicals (e.g., Catharine Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 3d ed., London, 1770, p. 9: “All systematical writers on the side of freedom plan their forms and rules of government on the just grounds of the known corruption and wickedness of the human character”).
7. Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, pp. 373, 428; [Thomas Jefferson], A Summary View of the Rights of British America … (Williamsburg, [1774]: JHL Pamphlet 43), p. 22; [John Trenchard and Walter Moyle], An Argument, p. 4 (reprinted in The Pamphleteer …, X [1817], 114); [Samuel Seabury], An Alarm to the Legislature of the Province of New-York … (New York, 1775), in Clarence H. Vance, ed., Letters of a Westchester Farmer (Publications of the Westchester County Historical Society, VIII, White Plains, 1930), p. 159. For other examples of the almost obsessive concern in the colonies with standing armies, see No Standing Army in the British Colonies … (New York, 1775); Noble, Some Strictures (JHL 58), pp. 28–29; Genuine Principles (JHL 70), p. 23; Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery-Company … (Boston, 1773), pp. 26–28 (quoting Trenchard); James Lovell, An Oration … (Boston, 1771), pp. 8–9 (also quoting Trenchard); and above all, Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, pp. 400–445. Lois Schwoerer discusses the original context and literature of standing armies in England (see above, Chap. II, n. 18), and Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, 1959), deals with the subsequent English background at many points (see Index under “militia”). But the fullest discussion of the ideological meaning of standing armies is J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 22 (1965), 560 ff. Pocock, who dates the origins of “that concept or bogey” in 1675, argues that by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to mean not praetorians or janissaries but “a permanent professional force maintained by the administration and supplied out of the public exchequer”; as such, standing armies were feared as instruments in the systematic corruption of Parliament by the administration and hence of the overthrow of the balanced constitution. The colonists echoed this concern: see John Dickinson’s association of standing armies and excise collection in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania … (Philadelphia, 1768: JHL Pamphlet 23), pp. 60–61; and Simeon Howard’s definition of a standing army as “a number of men paid by the public to devote themselves wholly to the military profession,” who, though “really servants of the people and paid by them,” come to think of themselves as the King’s men exclusively and become “the means, in the hands of a wicked and oppressive sovereign, of overturning the constitution of a country and establishing the most intolerable despotism” (Sermon, pp. 26, 27). But the phrase was also commonly used loosely to mean simply the personal troops of the prince in states already lacking balanced constitutions; e.g., John Hancock, An Oration … (Boston, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 41), pp. 13–14.
8. Turkey as the ultimate refinement of despotism fascinated eighteenth-century Americans and Englishmen alike, their fascination doubtless heightened by the salacious details furnished in such perennial best sellers as Sir Paul Rycaut (or Ricaut), History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (first published 1668; 6th ed. 1686; reprinted continuously for a century afterward and lifted bodily into such comprehensive works as A Compleat History of the Turks, 4 vols., London, 1719), which jumbles together under the heading “Maxims of the Turkish Polity” chapters on the absolutism of the Turkish government, “The Affection and Friendship the Pages of the Seraglio Bear to Each Other” and “The Apartments of the Women.” From at least the mid-seventeenth century, writings on the absolutism of the Turks had served in England as disguised tracts for the times, commentaries “upon the English polity from a safe vantage point” (Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, London, 1964, p. 164). The early eighteenth-century polemicists continued to probe the inner characteristics of absolutism, and by contrast the nature of liberty, by examining the society and government of the Turks. There are innumerable discussions and references to Turkish despotism in Cato’s Letters; Letter 50, dilating on “that horrible and destroying government [of the Turks], a government fierce and inhuman, founded in blood, supported by barbarity,” includes eight pages of quotations from Rycaut. As a result, long before the Revolution the colonists were habituated to conceive of “the difference between free and enslaved countries” as “the difference between England and Turkey” (Boston Gazette or Country Journal, May 19, 1755); to see the ultimate in political oppression as “worse than Turkish cruelties” (M. G. Hall, et al., eds., The Glorious Revolution in America, Chapel Hill, 1964, p. 45); and to think of total power “as absolute as that of the Great Turk” (Boston Evening Post, July 4, 1737). This terminology and this mode of thought were carried over directly into the Revolutionary literature. See, for example, [William H. Drayton], A Letter from Freeman of South-Carolina … Charleston, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 45), p. 8; and [Richard Bland], The Colonel Dismounted: Or the Rector Vindicated … (Williamsburg, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 4), p. 26.
For an elaborate discussion of the “awful lesson” of Poland entirely in the spirit of the Revolutionary pamphleteers, see Mercy Otis Warren, History of the … American Revolution … (Boston, 1805), II, 182–184. On France and the other familiar tyrannies, see the characteristic background in New York Evening Post, December 7, 1747, and the examples in Quincy, Observations, in Quincy, Memoir, pp. 443, 450–451; Dickinson, Farmer’s Letters (JHL 23), pp. 12, 46; [Stephen Johnson], Some Important Observations … (Newport, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 19), p. 11; [Alexander Hamilton], The Farmer Refuted … (New York, 1775), in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Harold C. Syrett, et al., eds., New York and London, 1961–), I, 122.
9. On the more recent despotisms, especially Denmark and Sweden, see Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), p. 35; Dulany, Considerations (JHL 13), p. 46n; Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country … (Salem, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 55), p. 21; H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 74, 137. On the surviving free states, see, for example, John Joachim Zubly, The Law of Liberty … (Philadelphia, 1775), Appendix, pp. 33–41; [Carter Braxton], An Address to … Virginia; on the Subject of Government … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 66), p. 18; [James Chalmers], Plain Truth … Containing Remarks on … Common Sense … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 64), pp. 9 ff.; [Charles Inglis], The True Interest of America … Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense … (Philadelphia, 1776), pp. 46, 61. For a detailed discussion of Moleworth’s influential Account of Denmark, see Robbins, Commonwealthman, pp. 98–109, 393–394. On the Corsicans, see e.g., Arthur Lee’s equation of their effort against the French and Genoese to those of the Athenians against Xerxes, the starving Romans against their various besiegers, the Flemish against “a very potent monarch,” and the Georgians against the Turks. “Monitor V,” Virginia Gazette (R), March 24, 1768.
10. Adams, Works, III, 477. For characteristic encomiums on the constitution and descriptions of its operating balance, see James Otis, Rights of the
British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 7), p. 47; Dulany, Considerations (JHL 13), p. 15; Johnson, Some Important Observations (JHL 19), pp. 27 ff.; Whitney, Transgressions, p. 10; Mather, America’s Appeal (JHL 59), pp. 7–8, 34 ff.
11. See below, Chap. V, sec. 2.
12. Adams, Works, III, 478–479. The conception of “constitution” as the arrangement of existing laws and practices of government may be traced back through the literature of the early eighteenth and the seventeenth centuries. So, traditionally, David Lloyd referred in 1706 to “the best constitution we could find, to wit: the common and statute laws of England” (Roy N. Lokken, David Lloyd, Seattle, 1959, p. 168). Similarly, in 1748 The Maryland Gazette printed a series of essays elaborating the idea that parliaments “are the very constitution itself,” that “our constitution is at present but a series of alterations made by Parliament,” and ridiculing the notion that “the Parliament cannot alter the constitution” (issues of April 27 and May 4 and Supplement to issue of May 11). Bolingbroke’s views are particularly interesting since, while he insisted that the constitution was immutable, that even kings must subject themselves to it, and that obedience was justified by the degree to which magistrates conformed to the constitution, he nevertheless defined a constitution as “that assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs, derived from certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of public good, that compose the general system according to which the community hath agreed to be governed”: “Dissertation on Parties,” Letter X, in Works … (London, 1754), II, 130. Cf. J. H. Burns, “Bolingbroke and the Concept of Constitutional Government,” Political Studies, 10 (1962), 264–276. For particularly close anticipations of Adams’ imagery and understanding of constitutions, see the discussion of the “natural or political body … composed of springs, wheels, and ligaments,” and of the “stamina, first principles, or original constitution” of government, in Cato’s Letters, nos. 69 and 84.
13. A Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1760: JHL Pamphlet 2), p. 3; Adams, Works, III, 479; Otis, Rights of the British Colonies (JHL 7), p. 47; Johnson, Some Important Observations (JHL 19), p. 28. For a characteristic pre-Revolutionary statement of the relation between fundamental law and the constitution, see Boston Gazette and Country Journal, May 10, 1756, where an anonymous essayist explained that Magna Carta “is only declaratory of the principal grounds, of the fundamental laws and liberties of England … so that it seems rather to be a collection of ancient privileges from the common law ratified by the suffrage of the people and claimed by them as their reserved rights. It is in short the constitution of English government — the basis of English law — the compact — the standing perpetual rule over which no man nor any body of men distinct from the whole may claim any just superiority.” There was an obvious answer, the writer made clear, to the question “whether the three branches [of Parliament] is the constitution, or whether they are not circumscribed by some rules established previous to their existence, which they may not depart from.” If Parliament were to pass a law that altered the constitution, the writer argued in phrases that anticipate both James Otis’ famous self-contradictions and the ultimate grounds of American defiance of Parliament, “would the people, if they did not like the alteration, think themselves obliged to abide by such a law? Notwithstanding the veneration which is justly due to an act of Parliament, the known wisdom of British Parliament will hardly admit of the supposition.” (Italics added.)
14. [Robert Carter Nicholas], Considerations on the Present State of Virginia Examined ([Williamsburg], 1774), in the Earl G. Swem edition (New York, 1919), p. 40.
15. On the origins and development of this theory of the English constitution, see Corinne C. Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords, 1556–1832 (London, 1965), where it is argued that, though the idea of mixed government was an ancient one, it acquired its classic English form in Charles I’s His Majesties Answer to the XIX. Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament (London, 1642). Before the appearance of that pamphlet “the term three estates had been used officially and popularly to designate the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, and the commons” (p. 31). For a model statement of the concept as it was transmitted to the colonists in the early eighteenth century, see The Spectator, no. 287 (January 29, 1711/12), where the roots of the idea in classical antiquity are traced and where the main emphasis is placed on the liberty-preserving force of dividing government among persons “of different ranks and interests, for where they are of the same rank, it differs but little from a despotical government in a single person.” Safety would be found in a government in which power was divided among “persons so happily distinguished that by providing for the particular interests of their several ranks they are providing for the whole body of the people.” For a view of the theory of the mixed constitution as an expression of the fundamental change in intellectual orientation from medieval scholasticism to modern empiricism, see W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics … 1500–1700 (London, 1964), chap. ix. See also Stanley Pargellis, “The Theory of Balanced Government,” in Conyers Read, ed., The Constitution Reconsidered (New York, 1938), pp. 37–49, and below, Chap. VI, sec. 3.
16. Robert Shackleton argues (“Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, and the Separation of Powers,” French Studies, III [1949], 25–38, and Montesquieu [Oxford, 1961], pp. 298–301) that Montesquieu interpreted the balance of the English constitution in terms of the modern idea of the separation of functioning powers, and that he derived this idea from Bolingbroke’s Craftsman. The argument seems unconvincing on both points from the evidence presented. The most that can be said, it would seem, is that in discussing the English constitution Montesquieu did attempt to show the matching of social powers with the functioning powers of government (which he did, indeed, clearly define as legislative, executive, and judicial) but that he did not succeed in doing so with any clarity. See Spirit of the Laws (Franz Neumann, ed., New York, 1949), bk. xi, sec. 6 (esp. p. 156; cf. p. lviii). His partial and confused mingling of the idea of the mixed state with the modern idea of the separation of powers (which the colonists did, on occasion, unambiguously extract from his writing: e.g., Boston Gazette and Country Journal, January 2, 1758) is described in Weston, English Constitutional Theory, pp. 124–125; in Betty Kemp, King and Commons, 1660–1832 (London, 1959), pp. 82–85; and above all in W. B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers (Tulane Studies in Political Science, IX, New Orleans, 1965), pp. 104, 109—a work of particular importance that came to hand too late to be used in the writing of this book. Bolingbroke in his debate with Walpole’s publicists over whether balance in government is properly attained by the independence or by the mutual dependence of powers, assumed, as did his opponents, that the object of discussion was England’s mixed government, or constitution, of King, Lords, and Commons. See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, 1968), esp. chap. vi, and Gwyn, Separation of Powers, pp. 91–99. Bolingbroke’s arguments, jumbling the concepts of balances and checks, the mixed constitution and the separation of powers, are echoed by Thomas Hutchinson in his notable message of July 14, 1772, to the Massachusetts House in which he sought to justify the proposed independent salary of the Massachusetts governor by analogy to the independence of King, Lords, and Commons in England. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of … Massachusetts-Bay (Lawrence S. Mayo, ed., Cambridge, 1936), III, Appendix W (esp. pp. 408–409). It is suggested below, Chap. VI, sec. 3, that in America the origins of the modern doctrine of the separation of functioning powers lay in the Revolutionary effort to recreate balance in governments within a society systematically lacking in divisions of rank or estate. For an account of the intense and revealing discussion of Montesquieu and the doctrine of the separation of power in Massachusetts on the eve of the Revolutionary controversy, see Ellen E. Brennan, Plural Office-Holding in Massachusetts, 1760–1780 (Chapel Hill, 1945), chap. ii; on the E
nglish origins of the doctrine, see Gwyn, Separation of Powers, chaps. iii–v.
17. Francis Hotman, Franco-Gallia … (Molesworth trans., 2nd ed., London, 1721), p. vii (Molesworth’s Introduction was republished separately in 1775 as The Principles of a Real Whig); Mather, America’s Appeal (JHL 59), p. 8. Cf. Trenchard’s formulation in his History of Standing Armies, copied with approval by Bolingbroke in his Craftsman, no. 198 (in collected edition, London, 1731, VI, 142): “All wise governments endeavor, as much as possible, to keep the legislative and executive parts asunder, that they may be a check upon one another. Our government trusts the King with no part of the legislative but a negative voice, which is absolutely necessary to preserve the executive. One part of the duty of the House of Commons is to punish offenders and redress the grievances occasioned by the executive part of the government; and how can that be done if they should happen to be the same persons, unless they would be public-spirited enough to hang or drown themselves?”
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 13