The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  6. Catharine Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (3d ed., London, 1770), pp. 7, 13; Romney Sedgwick, ed., Letters from George III to Lord Bute, 1756–1766 (London, 1939), p. xli.

  7. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third (Denis Le Marchant, ed., London, 1845), I, 10; III, 233; IV, 92; Hansard, Parliamentary History, XVI, 842 (cf. Walpole, Memoirs, IV, 94); Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, p. 314 and n. 2; J. A. Cochrane, Dr. Johnson’s Printer (Cambridge, 1964), p. 173, n. 3; Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago, 1965), p. 104; Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, pp. 35, 11; M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792 (Oxford, 1959), I, 120–121. On the actuality of Bute’s influence, see Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), pp. 104–109.

  8. John Sawbridge, quoted in Gipson, British Empire, XII, 127, 136; Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform, pp. 127, 136, 223, 67; Fothergill to Lt. Col. Ironside, December 22, 1774, in Bulletin of the Friends Historical Society, 5 (1913), 5; Strahan to David Hall, August 24, 1770, November 10, 1768, Pa. Mag., XI (1887–88), 351; X (1886), 464. Fothergill admitted, however, that there was a high degree of “national corruption,” which he explained not as a result of “the riches of the east” but rather of the sensualism and libertinism generated by slavery that the West India planters brought back to England.

  9. Henry C. Van Schaack, The Life of Peter Van Schaack (New York, 1842), pp. 58, 56–57. So too James Iredell, reconstructing in 1776 the evolution of the policies of the Continental Congress, explained that the starting point for all policy decisions had been a careful estimation of the motivation of the ministry: had Grenville, it was asked, “acted from principle and not from any bad motive”? Iredell, “Causes Leading up to the American Revolution,” in Griffith J. McRee, ed., Life and Correspondence of James Iredell … (New York, 1857–58), I, 312 ff.

  10. Bernard’s fear of a conspiratorial faction is the main theme that runs through his extensive correspondence of the 1760’s (13 vols., Sparks MSS, Houghton Library, Harvard University, excerpted in The Barrington-Bernard Correspondence …, Edward Channing and A. C. Coolidge, eds., Cambridge, 1912); see also Gipson, British Empire, X, 116; XI, 33–34, 155, 157, 159; Bernard to Earl of Halifax, December 2, 1763, in Josiah Quincy, Jr., Reports of Cases … in the Superior Court of Judicature … Between 1761 and 1772 … (Samuel M. Quincy, ed., Boston, 1865), p. 394.

  11. Hansard, Parliamentary History, pp. 479, 478 (cf. Gipson, British Empire, XI, 234, 244).

  12. “Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive: party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.” Bolingbroke, “The Idea of a Patriot King,” in Works … (London, 1754), III, 83.

  13. “Monitor IX,” Virginia Gazette (R), April 21, 1768; Frothingham, Warren, p. 158.

  14. William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts … (Worcester, 1837), pp. 87, 88. (I owe this reference to Richard D. Brown.)

  15. Merrill Jensen, ed., American Colonial Documents to 1776 (English Historical Documents, IX, London, 1955), p. 851; Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (W. C. Ford, et al., eds., Washington, D.C., 1904–1937), IV, 146n, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146. Cf. references in Burnett, Letters, I, 348, and American Historical Review, I (1895–96), 684 ff.

  16. John H. Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence, Its History (New York, 1906), pp. 232 ff.; [Thomas Hutchinson], Strictures … (Malcolm Freiberg, ed., Boston, 1958 [Old South Leaflets, no. 227]), pp. 5–7, 9. See also the English government’s quasi-official 132-page Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London, 1776), written, on commission of the Treasury, by John Lind.

  17. On the supposed link-up among colonial conspirators, opposition factions in England, and the suspicious conduct of General Howe on the field of battle, see especially Joseph Galloway’s Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion … (London, 1780), and his A Reply to … Sir William Howe … (London, 1780).

  18. See especially Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill, 1941); John C. Miller, Sam Adams, Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston, 1936), and his Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943). For an excellent account of the process by which the ideological arguments of participants in the Revolution became built into the structure of historical explanation, see Sydney G. Fisher, “The Legendary and Myth-making Process in Histories of the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 51 (1912), 53–75.

  19. Sir Henry Cavendish’s Debates of the House of Commons … (John Wright, ed., London, 1841–1843), I, 398–399.

  Chapter V

  TRANSFORMATION

  But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.

  — John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 1818

  IT WAS an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere. In the light of such a conception everything about the colonies and their controversy with the mother country took on a new appearance. Provincialism was gone: Americans stood side by side with the heroes of historic battles for freedom and with the few remaining champions of liberty in the present. What were once felt to be defects — isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weakness in the authority of the state — could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal, and hope wherever they might be — in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes. The mere existence of the colonists suddenly became philosophy teaching by example. Their manners, their morals, their way of life, their physical, social, and political condition were seen to vindicate eternal truths and to demonstrate, as ideas and words never could, the virtues of the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers.

  But the colonists’ ideas and words counted too, and not merely because they repeated as ideology the familiar utopian phrases of the Enlightenment and of English libertarianism. What they were saying by 1776 was familiar in a general way to reformers and illuminati everywhere in the Western world; yet it was different. Words and concepts had been reshaped in the colonists’ minds in the course of a decade of pounding controversy — strangely reshaped, turned in unfamiliar directions, toward conclusions they could not themselves clearly perceive. They found a new world of political thought as they struggled to work out the implications of their beliefs in the years before Independence. It was a world not easily possessed; often they withdrew in some confusion to more familiar ground. But they touched its boundaries, and, at certain points, probed its interior. Others, later — writing and revising the first state constitutions, drafting and ratifying the federal constitution, and debating in detail, exhaustively, the merits of these efforts — would resume the search for resolutions of the problems the colonists had broached before 1776.

  This critical probing of traditional concepts — part of the colonists’ effort to express reality as they knew it and to shape it to ideal ends — became the basis for all further discussions of enlightened reform, in Europe as well as in America. The radicalism the Americans conveyed to the world in 1776 was a transformed as well as a transforming force.

  I. REPRESENTATION AND CONSENT

  The question of representation was the first serious intellectual problem to come between England and the colonies, and while it was not the most important issue involved in the Anglo-American controversy (the w
hole matter of taxation and representation was “a mere incident,” Professor McIlwain has observed, in a much more basic constitutional struggle1), it received the earliest and most exhaustive examination and underwent a most revealing transformation. This shift in conception took place rapidly; it began and for all practical purposes concluded in the two years of the Stamp Act controversy. But the intellectual position worked out by the Americans in that brief span of time had deep historical roots; it crystallized, in effect, three generations of political experience. The ideas the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that had long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.

  What had taken place in the earlier years of colonial history was the partial re-creation, as a matter of fact and not of theory, of a kind of representation that had flourished in medieval England but that had faded and been superseded by another during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its original, medieval, form elective representation to Parliament had been a device by which “local men, locally minded, whose business began and ended with the interests of the constituency,” were enabled, as attorneys for their electors, to seek redress from the royal court of Parliament, in return for which they were expected to commit their constituents to grants of financial aid. Attendance at Parliament of representatives of the commons was for the most part an obligation unwillingly performed, and local communities bound their representatives to local interests in every way possible: by requiring local residency or the ownership of local property as a qualification for election, by closely controlling the payment of wages for official services performed, by instructing representatives minutely as to their powers and the limits of permissible concessions, and by making them strictly accountable for all actions taken in the name of the constituents. As a result, representatives of the commons in the medieval Parliaments did not speak for that estate in general or for any other body or group larger than the specific one that had elected them.2

  Changing circumstances, however, had drastically altered this form and practice of representation. By the time the institutions of government were taking firm shape in the American colonies, Parliament in England had been transformed. The restrictions that had been placed upon representatives of the commons to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away; members came to sit “not merely as parochial representatives, but as delegates of all the commons of the land.” Symbolically incorporating the state, Parliament in effect had become the nation for purposes of government, and its members virtually if not actually, symbolically if not by sealed orders, spoke for all as well as for the group that had chosen them. They stood for the interest of the realm; for Parliament, in the words by which Edmund Burke immortalized this whole concept of representation, was not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.” “Instructions, therefore,” Speaker Onslow said, “from particular constituents to their own Members are or can be only of information, advice, and recommendation … but not absolutely binding upon votes and actings and conscience in Parliament.” The restrictions once placed upon representatives to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away.3

  But the colonists, reproducing English institutions in miniature, had been led by force of circumstance to move in the opposite direction. Starting with seventeenth-century assumptions, out of necessity they drifted backward, as it were, toward the medieval forms of attorneyship in representation. Their surroundings had recreated to a significant extent the conditions that had shaped the earlier experiences of the English people. The colonial towns and counties, like their medieval counterparts, were largely autonomous, and they stood to lose more than they were likely to gain from a loose acquiescence in the action of central government. More often than not they felt themselves to be the benefactors rather than the beneficiaries of central government, provincial or imperial; and when they sought favors from higher authorities they sought local and particular — in effect private — favors. Having little reason to identify their interests with those of the central government, they sought to keep the voices of local interests clear and distinct; and where it seemed necessary, they moved — though with little sense of innovating or taking actions of broad significance, and nowhere comprehensively or systematically — to bind representatives to local interests. The Massachusetts town meetings began the practice of voting instructions to their deputies to the General Court in the first years of settlement, and they continued to do so whenever it seemed useful throughout the subsequent century and a half. Elsewhere, with variations, it was the same; and elsewhere, as in Massachusetts, it became customary to require representatives to be residents of, as well as property owners in, the localities that elected them, and to check upon their actions as delegates. With the result that disgruntled contemporaries felt justified in condemning Assemblies composed “of plain, illiterate husbandmen, whose views seldom extended farther than to the regulation of highways, the destruction of wolves, wildcats, and foxes, and the advancement of the other little interests of the particular counties which they were chosen to represent.”4

  All of this, together with the associated experience common to all of the colonies of selecting and controlling agents to speak for them in England,5 formed the background for the discussion of the first great issue of the Anglo-American controversy. For the principal English argument put forward in defense of Parliament’s right to pass laws taxing the colonies was that the colonists, like the “nine tenths of the people of Britain” who do not choose representatives to Parliament, were in fact represented there. The power of actually voting for representatives, it was claimed, was an accidental and not a necessary attribute of representation, “for the right of election is annexed to certain species of property, to peculiar franchises, and to inhabitancy in certain places.” In what really counted there was no difference between those who happened to live in England and those in America: “none are actually, all are virtually represented in Parliament,” for, the argument concluded,

  every Member of Parliament sits in the House not as representative of his own constituents but as one of that august assembly by which all the commons of Great Britain are represented. Their rights and their interests, however his own borough may be affected by general dispositions, ought to be the great objects of his attention and the only rules for his conduct, and to sacrifice these to a partial advantage in favor of the place where he was chosen would be a departure from his duty.6

  In England the practice of “virtual” representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection. It was its opposite, the idea of representation as attorneyship, that was seen as “a new sort of political doctrine strenuously enforced by modern malcontents.” But in the colonies the situation was reversed. There, where political experience had led to a different expectation of the process of representation and where the workings of virtual representation in the case at hand were seen to be damaging, the English argument was met at once with flat and universal rejection, ultimately with derision. It consists, Daniel Dulany wrote in a comprehensive refutation of the idea, “of facts not true and of conclusions inadmissible.” What counts, he said in terms with which almost every writer in America agreed, was the extent to which representation worked to protect the interests of the people against the encroachments of government. From this point of view the analogy between the nonelectors in England and those in America was utterly specious, for the interests of Englishmen who did not vote for members of Parli
ament were intimately bound up with those who did and with those chosen to sit as representatives. The interests of all three, “the nonelectors, the electors, and the representatives, are individually the same, to say nothing of the connection among the neighbors, friends, and relations. The security of the nonelectors against oppression is that their oppression will fall also upon the electors and the representatives. The one can’t be injured and the other indemnified.” But no such “intimate and inseparable relation” existed between the electors of Great Britain and the inhabitants of the colonies. The two groups were by no means involved in the same consequences of taxation: “not a single actual elector in England might be immediately affected by a taxation in America imposed by a statute which would have a general operation and effect upon the properties of the inhabitants of the colonies.”7

  Once a lack of natural identity of interests between representatives and the populace was conceded, the idea of virtual representation lost any force it might have had; for by such a notion, James Otis wrote, you could “as well prove that the British House of Commons in fact represent all the people of the globe as those in America.” The idea, in such situations, was “futile” and “absurd” — the work of a “political visionary.” It was a notion, Arthur Lee wrote, with supporting quotations from Bolingbroke, Locke, Sidney, Camden, Pulteney, Petyt, Sir Joseph Jekyll, and assorted Parliamentary speakers, that “would, in the days of superstition, have been called witchcraft,” for what it means is that while “our privileges are all virtual, our sufferings are real … We might have flattered ourselves that a virtual obedience would have exactly corresponded with a virtual representation, but it is the ineffable wisdom of Mr. Grenville to reconcile what, to our feeble comprehensions, appeared to be contradictions, and therefore a real obedience is required to this virtual power.” Who, precisely, is the American freeman’s virtual representative in England?