That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; but if they had not realized it themselves they would soon have discovered it from the flood of newspapers, pamphlets, and letters that poured in on them from opposition sources in England. Again and again reports from the home country proclaimed that the English nation had departed, once and for all and completely, from the true principles of liberty: the principles not of “certain modern Whigs,” as one English pamphlet of 1774, reprinted in the colonies no less than seven times within a year of its first appearance, explained, but of “Whigs before the [Glorious] Revolution and at the time of it; I mean the principles which such men as Mr. Locke, Lord Molesworth, and Mr. Trenchard maintained with their pens, Mr. Hampden and Lord [William] Russell with their blood, and Mr. Algernon Sidney with both.” To those Englishmen who in the 1770’s most directly inherited and most forcefully propagated these principles — Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, James Burgh — the situation at home if not abroad justified, even exaggerated, the worst fears for the future of liberty that their predecessors had expressed. For these latter-day radicals had witnessed personally the threatening rise of prerogative influence in the English government and its dramatic manifestation in the Wilkes affair; and they had seen revealed the rapacity and bankruptcy of the swollen East India Company, a revelation which illuminated to them the corruption of their era as dramatically as the collapse of the South Sea Company had revealed the rottenness of the era of George I to Trenchard and Gordon. Everywhere there was cynicism and gluttonous self-seeking. What more was needed to convince one that affairs in Britain were plummeting toward complete and irrecoverable collapse? The long-awaited signs of the total degeneration of the moral qualities necessary to preserve liberty were unmistakable, and these English radicals said so, vigorously, convincingly, in a series of increasingly shrill pamphlets and letters that were read avidly, circulated, published and republished, in America.38
But it was not only the radicals. A wide range of public figures and pamphleteers, known and read in America, carried forward the cries of corruption that had been heard in earlier years and directed them to the specific political issues of the day. William Bollan, the former agent and advocate-general of Massachusetts, still well known in America and experienced in analyzing colonial affairs, produced in London in 1768 two pamphlets of blasting condemnation, one “wherein the great mischief and danger of corruption are set forth and proved from its operations in Greece and Rome,” the other covering, as the title indicated, the whole range of Continued Corruption, Standing Armies, and Popular Discontents. In the same vein the prominent London printer and publicist (and political conservative) William Strahan wondered, in letters to the Philadelphian David Hall, publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, whether England had “virtue enough to be saved from that deluge of corruption with which we have been so long overwhelmed” — a concern that gnawed at him as he contemplated the “immense sums [that] are daily given to secure seats in Parliament” and that resulted in the selection of “men who in the east, by rapine and plunder, in most cases attended with the most shocking instances of barbarity, have suddenly acquired immense wealth. Such you will perhaps think not the most proper guardians of our constitution and liberties.” He could only hope, he wrote, that “before matters come to extremity the nation … the happiest nation this world ever contained … will come to their senses, and not suffer a fabric, the work of ages and the envy of the rest of the world, to be materially injured.”
But far greater voices than these were heard, some in the highest reaches of the English government. In the year of Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents, the most famous of all the attacks on the plots of “a certain set of intriguing men … to secure to the court the unlimited and uncontrolled use of its own vast influence under the sole direction of its own private favor … [pursuing] a scheme for undermining all the foundations of our freedom,” Burke’s patron, the Marquis of Rockingham, explained in a speech in the House of Lords the “total change in the old system of English government” which could be traced to the accession of George III and which alone could explain the secret motivations behind the Stamp Act. But it was left for the colonists’ Olympian champion, William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, to probe the ultimate sources of English corruption. The reason “the constitution at this moment stands violated,” this grandson of “Diamond Pitt,” East India merchant and governor of Madras, declared, is perfectly clear:
For some years past there has been an influx of wealth into this country which has been attended with many fatal consequences, because it has not been the regular, natural produce of labor and industry. The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no private hereditary fortune could resist. My Lords, I say nothing but what is within the knowledge of us all; the corruption of the people is the great original cause of the discontents of the people themselves, of the enterprise of the crown, and the notorious decay of the internal vigor of the constitution.
Something, he said, must be done, immediately, “to stop the rapid progress of corruption”; he advocated strengthening the health of Parliament as a representative body by increasing the number of representatives from the still independent, unbought constituencies, the counties and the great and growing cities, at the expense of the rotten, purchasable, boroughs.39
All of this was borne to America, and there carried conviction to a far larger part of the population, and bore more dramatic implications than it did in England. “Liberty,” John Adams wrote, “can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul,” and what liberty can be expected to flow from England where “luxury, effeminacy, and venality are arrived at such a shocking pitch” and where “both electors and elected are become one mass of corruption”? It was not hard to see where England stood: it was, Adams declared, precisely at the point “where the Roman republic was when Jugurtha left it, and pronounced it ‘a venal city, ripe for destruction, if it can only find a purchaser.’” The analogy to the decline and fall of Rome and its empire was intriguing and informative; others carried it further and became more specific. Like Rome in its decline, England, “from being the nursery of heroes, became the residence of musicians, pimps, panders, and catamites.” The swift decline of her empire, which, it was observed, had reached its peak only between 1758 and the Stamp Act, resulted from the same poison that had proved so fatal to free states in classical antiquity: the corruption, effeminacy, and languor that came from “the riches and luxuries of the East” and led to a calamitous “decay of virtue” and the collapse of the constitution. Even Franklin, his old caution and careful optimism gone, agreed, writing in 1775 to his one-time political ally Joseph Galloway, that he would himself, reluctantly, have to oppose Galloway’s plan for reconciliation.
… when I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state, and the glorious public virtue so predominant in our rising country, I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union. I fear they will drag us after them in all the plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustice, and rapacity may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them. Here numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty. I apprehend, therefore, that to unite us intimately will only be to corrupt and poison us also.
Patrick Henry used a variation of the same argume
nt in discussing Galloway’s proposal in Congress: “We shall liberate our constituents from a corrupt House of Commons but throw them into the arms of an American legislature that may be bribed by that nation which avows, in the face of the world, that bribery is a part of her system of government.” Even Galloway himself had to agree that “Parliament and ministry is wicked and corrupt.” So often, so stridently, and so convincingly was it said in the colonies that in England “luxury has arrived to a great pitch; and it is a universal maxim that luxury indicates the declension of a state” — so often was it argued that vigor was gone, exhaustion and poverty approaching, that those who would defend British policy were obliged to debate the point: to assert the health and strength of English society, arguing, as Samuel Seabury did, that England was a “vigorous matron, just approaching a green old age; and with spirit and strength sufficient to chastise her undutiful and rebellious children” and not at all, as his adversary Alexander Hamilton had pictured her, “an old, wrinkled, withered, worn-out hag.”40
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists. It gave a radical new meaning to their claims: it transformed them from constitutional arguments to expressions of a world regenerative creed. For they had long known — it had been known everywhere in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth century — that England was one of the last refuges of the ancient gothic constitution that had once flourished everywhere in the civilized world. And now, in the outpourings of colonial protest, it was again repeated, but with new point and urgency, that by far “the greatest part of the human race” already lies in “total subjection to their rulers.” Throughout the whole continent of Asia people are reduced “to such a degree of abusement and degradation”
that the very idea of liberty is unknown among them. In Africa, scarce any human beings are to be found but barbarians, tyrants, and slaves: all equally remote from the true dignity of human nature and from a well-regulated state of society. Nor is Europe free from the curse. Most of her nations are forced to drink deep of the bitter cup. And in those in which freedom seem to have been established, the vital flame is going out. Two kingdoms, those of Sweden and Poland, have been betrayed and enslaved in the course of one year. The free towns of Germany can remain free no longer than their potent neighbors shall please to let them. Holland has got the forms if she has lost the spirit of a free country. Switzerland alone is in the full and safe possession of her freedom.
And if now, in this deepening gloom, the light of liberty went out in Britain too — in Britain, where next to “self-preservation, political liberty is the main aim and end of her constitution” — if, as events clearly portended and as “senators and historians are repeatedly predicting … continued corruption and standing armies will prove mortal distempers in her constitution” — what then? What refuge will liberty find?
“To our own country,” it was answered, “must we look for the biggest part of that liberty and freedom that yet remains, or is to be expected, among mankind … For while the greatest part of the nations of the earth are held together under the yoke of universal slavery, the North American provinces yet remain the country of free men: the asylum, and the last, to which such may yet flee from the common deluge.” More than that: “our native country … bids the fairest of any to promote the perfection and happiness of mankind.” No one, of course, can predict “the state of mankind in future ages.” But insofar as one can judge the ultimate “designs of providence by the number and power of the causes that are already at work, we shall be led to think that the perfection and happiness of mankind is to be carried further in America than it has ever yet been in any place.” Consider the growth the colonies had enjoyed in so short a time — growth in all ways, but especially in population: a great natural increase it had been, supplemented by multitudes from Europe, “tired out with the miseries they are doomed to at home,” migrating to America “as the only country in which they can find food, raiment, and rest.” Consider also the physical vigor of the people. But above all consider the moral health of the people and of the body politic.
The fatal arts of luxury and corruption are but comparatively beginning among us … Nor is corruption yet established as the common principle in public affairs. Our representatives are not chosen by bribing, corrupting, or buying the votes of the electors. Nor does it take one half of the revenue of a province to manage her house of commons … We have been free also from the burden and danger of standing armies … Our defense has been our militia … the general operation of things among ourselves indicate strong tendencies towards a state of greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen.
No one, therefore, can conceive of the cause of America as “the cause of a mob, of a party, or a faction.” The cause of America “is the cause of self-defense, of public faith, and of the liberties of mankind … ‘In our destruction, liberty itself expires, and human nature will despair of evermore regaining its first and original dignity.’”41
This theme, elaborately orchestrated by the colonial writers, marked the fulfillment of the ancient idea, deeply embedded in the colonists’ awareness, that America had from the start been destined to play a special role in history. The controversy with England, from its beginning in the early 1760’s, had lent support to that belief, so long nourished by so many different sources: the covenant theories of the Puritans, certain strands of Enlightenment thought, the arguments of the English radicals, the condition of life in the colonies, even the conquest of Canada. It had been the Stamp Act that had led John Adams to see in the original settlement of the colonies “the opening of a grand scene and design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” And Jonathan Mayhew, celebrating the conclusion of the same episode, had envisioned future streams of refugees escaping from a Europe sunk in “luxury, debauchery, venality, intestine quarrels, or other vices.” It was even possible, Mayhew had added, “who knows?” that “our liberties being thus established, … on some future occasion … we or our posterity may even have the great felicity and honor to … keep Britain herself from ruin.”42
Now, in 1774, that “future occasion” was believed to be at hand. After the passage of the Coercive Acts it could be said that “all the spirit of patriotism or of liberty now left in England” was no more than “the last snuff of an expiring lamp,” while “the same sacred flame … which once showed forth such wonders in Greece and in Rome … burns brightly and strongly in America.” Who ought then to suppress as “whimsical and enthusiastical” the belief that the colonies were to become “the foundation of a great and mighty empire, the largest the world ever saw to be founded on such principles of liberty and freedom, both civil and religious … [and] which shall be the principal seat of that glorious kingdom which Christ shall erect upon earth in the latter days”? America “ere long will build an empire upon the ruins of Great Britain; will adopt its constitution purged of its impurities, and from an experience of its defects will guard against those evils which have wasted its vigor and brought it to an untimely end.” The hand of God was “in America now giving a new epocha to the history of the world.”43
In the invigorating atmosphere of such thoughts, the final conclusion of the colonists’ logic could be drawn not with regret but with joy. For while everyone knew that when tyranny is abroad “submission is a crime”; while they readily acknowledged that “no obedience is due to arbitrary, unconstitutional edicts calculated to enslave a free people”; and while they knew that the invasion of the liberties of the people “constitutes a state of war with the people” who may properly use “all the power which God has given them” to protect themselves — nevertheless they hesitated to come to a final separation even after Lexington and Bunker Hill. They hesitated, moving slowly and reluctantly, protesting “before God and the world that the utmost of [our] wish is that things may return to their old ch
annel.” They hesitated because their “sentiments of duty and affection” were sincere; they hesitated because their respect for constituted authority was great; and they hesitated too because their future as an independent people was a matter of doubt, full of the fear of the unknown.44
What would an independent American nation be? A republic, necessarily — and properly, considering the character and circumstances of the people. But history clearly taught that republics were delicate polities, quickly degenerating into anarchy and tyranny; it was impossible, some said, to “recollect a single instance of a nation who supported this form of government for any length of time or with any degree of greatness.” Others felt that independence might “split and divide the empire into a number of petty, insignificant states” that would easily fall subject to the will of “some foreign tyrant, or the more intolerable despotism of a few American demagogues”; the colonies might end by being “parceled out, Poland-like.”
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 18