The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  But if what the faint-hearted called “the ill-shapen, diminutive brat, INDEPENDENCY” contained within it all that remained of freedom; if it gave promise of growing great and strong and becoming the protector and propagator of liberty everywhere; if it were indeed true that “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind”; if “’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by our proceedings now” — if all of this were true, ways would be found by men inspired by such prospects to solve the problems of a new society and government. And so let every lover of mankind, every hater of tyranny,

  stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.45

  1. Jonathan Mayhew, Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts … (Boston, 1763), pp. 103–108.

  2. Mayhew, Observations, p. 57; Jonathan Mayhew, Remarks on an Anonymous Tract … Being a Second Defence … (Boston, 1764), p. 12; Alden Bradford, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew … (Boston, 1838), p. 372. For a full account of “the Anglican Plot,” see Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre (New York, 1962), chaps. vii–ix. See also Introduction to [John Aplin], Verses on Doctor Mayhew’s Book of Observations (Providence, 1763: JHL Pamphlet 3), in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, and pp. 254–257 below.

  3. Adams, Dissertation, in Works, III, 450, 451; Hume, “Of the Parties of Great Britain,” in Charles W. Hendel, ed., David Hume’s Political Essays (New York, 1953), pp. 86, 87; Henry A. Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams (New York, 1904–1908), I, 201–212. Fear of the conjunction of civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies was central to John Adams’ understanding of American history as well as of the Revolutionary crisis. It had been, he wrote, “a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America,” and it was this same confederacy that confronted Americans in 1765: “There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot to enslave all America. This, however, must be done by degrees. The first step that is intended seems to be an entire subversion of the whole system of our fathers by the introduction of the canon and feudal law into America (Works, III, 464). “Popery,” the conjunction of the Church of Rome with aggressive civil authority, was felt to be the greatest threat, the classic threat; but “popery” was only a special case, though the superlative one, of the more general phenomenon: “it has been a general mistake,” Molesworth had pointed out, to think “that the popish religion is the only one of all the Christian sects proper to introduce and establish slavery in a nation insomuch that popery and slavery have been thought inseparable … Other religions, and particularly the Lutheran, has [sic] succeeded as effectually in this design as ever popery did … It is not popery as such but the doctrine of a blind obedience, in what religion soever it be found, that is the destruction of the liberty and consequently of all the happiness of any nation.” An Account of Denmark … (London, 1694), pp. 258–259. Fear of the association of priesthood and magistracy in arbitrary rule runs through Eliot’s and Mayhew’s correspondences with Thomas Hollis; Mayhew contributed to the fear not only indirectly in his attacks on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel but directly in his Dudleian lecture, Popish Idolatry … (Boston, 1765). On the persistence of the fear of episcopacy and its spillover into secular problems, see, for example, Eliot to Hollis, January 26, 1771, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 255: “The design will never be abandoned — we fear a coup de main”; and, in general, Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, chap. ix: “Bishops and Stamps, 1764–1766.” For John Adams’ final summary of the Mayhew-Apthorp affair, see below, pp. 256–257.

  4. For a succinct explanation of the manifest threat of the Stamp Act, see Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 9), pp. 16–17. Adams’ almost paranoiac suspicions of Hutchinson’s hidden motives run through his Diary and Autobiography; e.g., I, 306; II, 39; III, 430. See also his “Novanglus” papers, in Works, IV, esp. pp. 62–63, 67–71, 87; and references in his correspondence: Works, X, 285–286, 298. It is the generality of such suspicions that accounts for the furor caused by the publication in 1773 of Hutchinson’s innocuous letters of 1768 — letters in which, the publishers wrote in the pamphlet’s title, “the Judicious Reader Will Discover the Fatal Source of the Confusion and Bloodshed” (JHL Pamphlet 40). Josiah Quincy thought he saw the final proof of Hutchinson’s conspiratorial efforts in his maneuverings with the North administration in London in 1774 and 1775: “Journal of Josiah Quincy Jun.… in England…,” MHS Procs., 50 (1916–17), 444, 446, 447, 450, 452. Thacher’s suspicions of Hutchinson (whom he called “Summa Potestatis,” or “Summa” for short) are traced in the Introduction to his Sentiments of a British American (Boston, 1764: JHL Pamphlet 8), in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I. Otis’ phrase is quoted from his abusive pamphlet, Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel … (Boston, 1765), p. 5. The charge against Howard appeared in the Providence Gazette, September 15, 1764, and is part of the intense antipathy that built up in Providence against the royalist group in Newport. See, in general, Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1953), chap. iv; and Introduction to Howard’s Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax (Newport, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 10).

  5. Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania … (Philadelphia, 1768: JHL Pamphlet 23), p. 55; Warren to Edmund Dana, Boston, March 19, 1766, in Richard Frothingham, Life and Times of Joseph Warren (Boston, 1865), pp. 21–22; Adams, Dissertation, in Works, III, 464; [Arthur Lee], “Monitor VI,” in Virginia Gazette (R), March 31, 1768. For an elaboration of Dickinson’s argument on the special dangers of “imperceptible” taxes, see Mercy Otis Warren, History of the … American Revolution … (Boston, 1805), I, 45.

  6. Dickinson, Farmer’s Letters (JHL 23), p. 54; Albert H. Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1905–1907), V, 83. Cf. Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1950), pp. 106–107, 277.

  7. [Silas Downer], A Discourse Delivered in Providence … at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty … (Providence, 1768: JHL Pamphlet 25), p. 10; Ebenezer Baldwin, … An Appendix Stating the Heavy Grievances …, published in Samuel Sherwood, A Sermon Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers … (New Haven, [1774]: JHL Pamphlet 52), pp. 52–53; Observations on Several Acts of Parliament … and Also on the Conduct of the Officers of the Customs … ([Boston], 1769: JHL Pamphlet 27), p. 15; William Gordon, Discourse Preached December 15th 1774 … (Boston, 1775), p. 11; [James Wilson], Considerations on the … Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 44), pp. 6–7; Dickinson, Farmer’s Letters (JHL 23), pp. 51n (citing at length the portentous example of the Irish establishment, honeycombed with “pensions … purloined out of the national treasure of Ireland under the MASK OF SALARIES ANNEXED TO PUBLIC OFFICES USELESS TO THE NATION, newly invented FOR THE PURPOSES OF CORRUPTION”), 55, 66; The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders … of … Boston … (Boston, [1772]: JHL Pamphlet 36), p. 21. See also, among the myriad expressions of resentment and fear of the extension of patronage offices in the colonies, [Henry Laurens], Extracts from the Proceedings of the High Court of Vice-Admiralty in Charlestown … with … Observations on American Custom-House Officers … (Charleston, 1769: JHL Pamphlet 26); Andrew Eliot’s excoriation of the “pitiful sycophants, court parasites, and hungry dependents” whom the colonists’ tax money would have to maintain “in luxury and extravagance” in letters to Hollis, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 420, 438; A Ministerial Catechise, Suitable To Be Learned by All Modern Provincial Governors, Pensioners, Placemen, &c. Dedicated to T[homas] H[utchinson], Esq. (Boston,
1771: JHL Pamphlet 34); A [Sixteenth] Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston … (Boston, 1886), p. 258; and the citations in H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience (Chapel Hill, 1965), pp. 76, 141; and in Gipson, British Empire, XI, 199, 201, 221, 523, 551, 552, 558. For a pre-Revolutionary expression of these same fears, illustrating the process of transmission of early eighteenth-century ideas into the Revolutionary ideology, see “A Letter to the Freeholders…,” Boston Gazette and Country Journal, April 26, 1756.

  8. For further details on the problem of the judiciary — which had been discussed in terms indistinguishable from those of the Revolutionary era probably as early as 1701 (Louis B. Wright, ed., An Essay upon the Government of the English Plantations …, San Marino, 1945, p. 40), certainly as early as 1707 (Roy N. Lokken, David Lloyd, Seattle, 1959, pp. 173–175) — and for documentation of the paragraphs that follow, see the Introduction and notes to A Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1760: JHL Pamphlet 2), in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I.

  9. Milton M. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York: Jury Trials and Judicial Tenure,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 17 (1960), 452.

  10. [William H. Drayton], A Letter from Freeman of South-Carolina … (Charleston, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 45), pp. 10, 20. For other characteristic expressions of the fear of a corrupt judiciary, see [John Allen], An Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty … (Boston, 1773; JHL Pamphlet 38), pp. 21 ff.; The Conduct of Cadwallader Colden … ([New York], 1767), reprinted in Collections of the New-York Historical Society, X (New York, 1877), 433–467; [John Allen], The American Alarm … for the Rights, and Liberties, of the People … (Boston, 1773: JHL Pamphlet 39), 1st sec., pp. 17, 20, 27, 28; Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), pp. 37–38; Adams, Diary and Autobiography, II, 36, 65–67; III, 297 ff.

  11. Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), p. 20; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of … Massachusetts-Bay (Lawrence S. Mayo, ed., Cambridge, 1936), III, 278, 279. See also, Gipson, British Empire, XII, 47, 139 ff., and Hutchinson, History, III, Appendices V, W.

  12. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York,” pp. 453–459.

  13. Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1960), pp. 125–126, 112. For further expressions of antipathy to the admiralty courts, see especially the Laurens pamphlet cited in note 7 above, and also, besides the references indexed in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, Adams, Works, III, 466–467; Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), p. 24; and Oliver M. Dickerson, comp., Boston under Military Rule, 1768–1769 … (Boston, 1936), pp. 46, 54, 56, 68, 72, which documents the popular comparison of vice-admiralty courts and the Court of Star Chamber.

  14. John Adams (“Novanglus”), Works, IV, 53 ff., 63, and citations in note 29 below; Ellen E. Brennan, Plural Office-Holding in Massachusetts, 1760–1780 (Chapel Hill, 1945), chaps. i, ii. See also references to Hutchinson, above, note 4.

  15. Drayton, Letter from Freeman (JHL 45), pp. 9, 18–19, 32–33; Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina under the Royal Government, 1719–1776 (New York, 1899), pp. 533–535, 710–713; Adams, Diary and Autobiography, I, 306; II, 39.

  16. For a detailed discussion of the Wilkes affair in the context of the present discussion, see Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 20 (1963), 373–395.

  17. Boston Sons of Liberty to Wilkes, June 6, 1768, MHS Procs., 47 (1913–14), 191. The quotation is from Vergil, Eclogues, i, 45: “pasture your cattle as of old.”

  18. William Palfrey to Wilkes, February 21, 1769, MHS Procs., 47 (1913–14), 197.

  19. Sixteenth Report of the Boston Record Commissioners, p. 263.

  20. Gipson, British Empire, X, 200–201, 328–329, 408; cf. Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766 (New York, 1960), pp. 87–96.

  21. Eliot to Hollis, Boston, September 27, 1768; July 10, September 7, 1769, in MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 428, 442, 444. The “Journal of the Times” was a series of newspaper articles published from October 13, 1768, to November 30, 1769. The pieces, dilating on day-by-day offenses of the military in Boston, were apparently written in Boston but were sent to New York for weekly publication in the New York Journal and to Pennsylvania for reprinting in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. After these two initial appearances the articles were again reprinted in the Boston Evening Post, and thereafter generally copied in American and English publications. The series has been collected by Oliver M. Dickerson as Boston under Military Rule, 1768–1769.

  22. George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), pp. 49 ff.; Maier, “Wilkes and American Disillusionment,” pp. 386–387; Gipson, British Empire, XI, 275, 281. For an example of the currency in personal correspondence of the St. George’s Fields “massacre,” see William Strahan to David Hall, London, December 30, 1768, Pa. Mag. 10 (1886), 468–469. On the role of the shooting of the Snider boy in the Revolutionary movement in Boston, see John Cary, Joseph Warren (Urbana, 1961), pp. 91–92.

  23. Eliot to Hollis, June 28, 1770, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 452.

  24. Allen, Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty (JHL 38), p. xiii; [Bowdoin, et al.], A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston … (Boston, 1770: JHL Pamphlet 32), reprinted within the year three times in Boston, three times in London and once (retitled) in Dublin; for the association of the Massacre with the problem of standing armies, see Short Narrative, p. 8. The annual Massacre Day orators played up this association in lurid detail: see, for example, Joseph Warren, An Oration … (Boston, 1772: JHL Pamphlet 35), pp. 11–12; John Hancock, An Oration … (Boston, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 41), pp. 13–15. The view of the Massacre held by John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., the lawyers who successfully defended the soldiers in court, is especially important. Both thought the Massacre was “the strongest of proofs of the danger of standing armies” despite their efforts on the soldiers’ behalf; Adams saw nothing incompatible between the verdict of the jury and his being invited to deliver one of the orations commemorating the Massacre, and Quincy publicly urged continued discussion of the “fatal effects of the policy of standing armies and … quartering troops in populous cities in time of peace.” Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun.… (Boston, 1825), p. 67; Adams, Diary and Autobiography, II, 74, 79; Gipson, British Empire, XI, 281. For the complete documentation and an excellent analysis of the trial, see L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, 1965), III.

  25. Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), pp. 13–30.

  26. For an analysis of the motivation behind the opposition to the Tea Act on the part of the merchant community, explicitly contradicting the interpretation of A. M. Schlesinger’s Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918), see Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wis., 1963), pp. 193 ff. Jensen concludes that “it is difficult to see how the constitutional question can be lightly dismissed as mere window dressing for the more fundamental economic questions when there is an impressive amount of contemporary testimony, private as well as public, to the contrary.”

  27. Thus the commonwealthman and regicide Edmund Ludlow described in his Memoirs (written 1663–1673) how Charles I, fatally attracted to French and Spanish despotism, “immediately after his ascent to the throne pulled off the mask, and openly discovered his intentions to make the crown absolute and independent” (C. H. Firth, ed., Oxford, 1894, I, 10). Similarly — or perhaps conversely — Governor Hunter of New York, who had for months been seething with indignation at the arrogance of the New York Assembly, finally wrote the Secretary of State in 1712 that “now the mask is thrown off; they have called in question the Council’s share in the legislation … and have but one short step to make towards what I am unwilling to name [i.e., independence].” E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York … (Albany, 1856–1887), V, 296; cf. pp. 255–256. The Secretary of State involved was Bolingbroke,
who himself used the phrase in similar circumstances: e.g., Works (Philadelphia, 1841), I, 116.

  28. [Alexander Hamilton], A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress … (New York, 1774), in Harold C. Syrett, et al., eds., Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York and London, 1961–), I, 50; Baldwin, Appendix (JHL 52), p. 67; [Samuel Seabury], A View of the Controversy … (New York, 1774), in Clarence H. Vance, ed., Letters of a Westchester Farmer (1774–1775) (Publications of the Westchester County Historical Society, VIII, White Plains, 1930), p. 123; Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the … Book of Esther … (Newburyport, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 58), pp. 28, 26; Hancock, Oration (JHL 41), p. 9; [Jefferson], A Summary View of the Rights of British America … (Williamsburg, [1774]: JHL Pamphlet 43), p. 11; on the development of Dickinson’s understanding of the cause of the crisis, see the Introduction to his Late Regulations (Philadelphia, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 14), in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I; Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, p. 155; Washington to Bryan Fairfax, August 27, 1774, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of George Washington … (Washington, D. C., 1931–1944), III, 241, 242; Gipson, British Empire, XII, 36n; MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 400, 429, 444; [Eighteenth] Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston … (Boston, 1887), p. 26 (cf. pp. 83–86).

  29. Quincy, Observations on the … Boston Port-Bill; with Thoughts on … Standing Armies (Boston, 1774), in Quincy, Memoir, p. 446 (cf. pp. 464–465); Adams, Works, X, 242–243 (for Adams’ full elaboration of the ministry’s “dark intrigues and wicked machinations” so clearly dovetailed with the Hutchinson clique’s maneuverings, see Works, IV, 18 ff., 62–64, 70, 91–92; Diary and Autobiography, II, 80, 90, 119); John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943), p. 332. For other expressions of the fear of “a constant, unremitted, uniform aim to enslave us,” see Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), pp. 30, 37; Allen, American Alarm (JHL 39), 1st sec., pp. 8–9, 17, 18, 33; Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan (New Haven, 1962), pp. 263–265.