The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  62. Dickinson, Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great-Britain, in Pennsylvania Archives, 2d ser., III, 603, 569–589. Cf. article 4 of the Declaration and Resolves of the first Continental Congress. Seabury, A View, in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, p. 119; [Joseph Galloway], A Reply to an Address to … a Candid Examination … (New York, 1775), pp. 17, 26, 20.

  63. Mather, America’s Appeal (JHL 59), pp. 44, 47, 34, 46.

  64. James Iredell, Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain (n.p., 1774), in McRee, Iredell, I, 206, 207, 217, 219; Wilson, Considerations (JHL 44), pp. [iii], 31. On Calvin’s Case and the legal-historical argument, see Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 709–710 (note 25) and documents cited there. See also Hutchinson’s arguments, Speeches, pp. 62–83; and, in general, Adams, Political Ideas, chaps. iii, v.

  65. Seabury, A View, in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, pp. 112, 125; [John Lind?], An Englishman’s Answer, to the Address, from the Delegates … (New York, 1775), pp. 14–16; Leonard (“Massachusettensis”), in Novanglus and Massachusettensis … (Boston, 1819), pp. 202–203 (also Massachusetts Gazette, February 20–27, 1775) Galloway’s Plan of Union, 1774, in Morison, Sources and Documents, pp. 116–118; [Chandler], What Think Ye of the Congress Now? p. 44. The distinction between fact and theory in accepting a division of sovereignty between internal and external jurisdictions was drawn with particular clarity by Thomas Pownall, replying to Dickinson’s Essay, in the 1774 edition of his Administration of the British Colonies, II, 89–111. Pownall, a former governor of Massachusetts and in general sympathetic to the colonies (see Introduction to Dulany’s Considerations, in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I), conceded that “in the ordinary exercise” of government, Parliament would respect the line Dickinson described, but “that in the intendment and remembrance of law, the power of Parliament, as a supreme censorial or remedial power, must be supposed to have a right to go to all cases whatsoever.” Similarly, though England has “given up forever” the levying of internal taxes on the colonies, she would never allow herself to suffer the “open test of humiliation” involved in formally renouncing that right (pp. 95–96). Pownall’s discussion in this 23-page “Postscript” on Dickinson’s Essay (and also in his book proper, chapter v and vol. II, 32 ff.) follows Dickinson’s in focusing sharply on the distinction between internal and external spheres of jurisdiction. Independence did not put an end to the discussion of this mode of distinguishing spheres of jurisdiction; it carried over into the debate on federalism in the early national period, as, e.g., in R. H. Lee’s “Federal Farmer” letters of 1787, as reprinted in Forrest McDonald, ed., Empire and Nation (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), pp. 110–111, 120.

  66. Royal Instructions to the Peace Commission of 1778, in Morison, Sources and Documents, pp. 192, 200.

  67. On the history of the debate on sovereignty in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, see, e.g., Adams, Political Ideas, chaps. vii, viii; Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Max Farrand, ed., New Haven, 1911–1937), I, 27, 323, 328, 331–332, 467; II, 347, 584; The Federalist, nos. 9, 15, 20, 31, 32, 39, 40, 44, 45, 62, 81; Jackson T. Main, The Antifederalists (Chapel Hill, 1961), pp. 120–125; Charles E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York, 1936), pp. 254 ff.; and above all, Madison’s private speculations, written to Jefferson in 1787, on “the due partition of power between the general and local governments,” in Boyd, Jefferson Papers, XII, 273–279, and his public statement of 1792, in Writings (G. Hunt, ed., New York, 1900–1910), VI, 91–93.

  68. Anon., “Concise View,” in Morse, Annals, p. 394.

  Chapter VI

  THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY

  The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.

  — Benjamin Rush, 1787

  ON SUCH fundamental issues — representation and consent, the nature of constitutions and of rights, the meaning of sovereignty — and in such basic ways, did the colonists probe and alter their inheritance of thought concerning liberty and its preservation. To conceive of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and their voices as mechanically exact expressions of the people; to assume, and act upon the assumption, that human rights exist above the law and stand as the measure of the law’s validity; to understand constitutions to be ideal designs of government, and fixed, limiting definitions of its permissible sphere of action; and to consider the possibility that absolute sovereignty in government need not be the monopoly of a single all-engrossing agency but (imperium in imperio) the shared possession of several agencies each limited by the boundaries of the others but all-powerful within its own — to think in these ways, as Americans were doing before Independence, was to reconceive the fundamentals of government and of society’s relation to government.

  These were, to be sure, probings, speculations, theories, by which a generation convinced of the importance of ideas in politics attempted to deal with the problems they faced. But they were not mere mental gymnastics. Not only did they provide the rational grounds of resistance to the authority of Parliament but by 1776 they had become matters of the most immediate, local urgency, for by then the colonies — independent states in all but name — had begun their extraordinary work of constitution writing. Up and down the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men — intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant — gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments. During the single year 1776 eight states drafted and adopted constitutions (two did so even before Independence). Everywhere there were discussions of the ideal nature of government; everywhere principles of politics were examined, institutions weighed, and practices considered. And these debates — which were but forerunners of discussions that would continue well into the nineteenth century, until the political and social meaning of the American Revolution would be more fully realized — were direct continuations of the discussions that had preceded Independence. The same issues and the same terms were involved. Indeed, some of the most original pamphlets written in the entire Revolutionary period appeared in the transition years 1775 and 1776, and treat simultaneously, as if they were a single undifferentiated set of problems, the constitutional questions of imperial relations and of the organization of the internal governments of the new states.

  The originality of these discussions of the nature of government and the uses of power was self-intensifying. Thinkers at each stage, impelled by a spirit at once quizzically pragmatic and loftily idealistic, built upon the conclusions of their predecessors and grasped implications only vaguely sensed before. The movement of thought was rapid, irreversible, and irresistible. It swept past boundaries few had set out to cross, into regions few had wished to enter.

  How infectious this spirit of pragmatic idealism was, how powerful — and dangerous — the intellectual dynamism within it, and how difficult it was to plot in advance the direction of its spread, had become clear well before Independence. Institutions were brought into question and condemned that appeared to have little if any direct bearing on the immediate issues of the Anglo-American struggle. New, and difficult, problems, beyond the range of any yet considered, unexpectedly appeared.

  I. SLAVERY

  No one had set out to question the institution of chattel slavery, but by 1776 it had come under severe attack by writers following out the logic of Revolutionary thought. The connection, for those who chose to see it, was obvious. “Slavery” was a central concept in eighteenth-century political discourse. As the absolute political evil, it appears in every statement of political principle, in every discussion of constitutionalism or legal rights, in every exhortation to resistance. Can any power in this province, a Massachus
etts polemicist asked in 1754, “make slaves of any part of the [British] nation?” Who would not choose “to dine upon a turnip, with old Fabricus, and be a freeman, rather than flow in luxury, and be a slave?” It was the loss of attachment to a free constitution that had plunged Rome from the summit of her glory “into the black gulf of infamy and slavery.” Tyrannical governments reduce people to “a kind of slaves to the ministers of state.” An ambitious ministry must be taught “that any attempt to enslave us would be as fruitless as it would be impolitic.” “Those who are taxed without their own consent expressed by themselves or their representatives,” John Dickinson wrote, with supporting quotations from Pitt and Camden, “are slaves. We are taxed without our consent expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore — SLAVES.” Yes, Josiah Quincy concluded in 1774, “I speak it with grief — I speak it with anguish — Britons are our oppressors: I speak it with shame — I speak it with indignation — we are slaves” — “the most abject sort of slaves,” said John Adams.1

  This was not simply lurid rhetoric. Slavery as a political concept had specific meaning which a later generation would lose. To eighteenth-century Americans it meant, as a newspaper writer put it in 1747, “a force put upon humane nature, by which a man is obliged to act, or not to act, according to the arbitrary will and pleasure of another”; it meant, a later pamphleteer wrote, “being wholly under the power and control of another as to our actions and properties.”2 It meant the inability to maintain one’s just property in material things and abstract rights, rights and things which a proper constitution guaranteed a free people. Both symptom and consequence of disease in the body politic, it was the condition that followed the loss of freedom, when corruption, classically, had destroyed the desire and capacity of the people to retain their independence: most commonly, when the elements of power had destroyed — by bribery, intimidation, or more subtle means — the independence of the “democratical” elements of the constitution.

  “Slavery” in this sense, far from being mere exclamation and hyperbole, was a term referring to a specific political condition, a condition characteristic of the lives of contemporary Frenchmen, Danes, and Swedes as well as of Turks, Russians, and Poles. And it applied equally to the black plantation laborers in the American colonies, for their condition was only a more dramatic, more bizarre variation of the condition of all who had lost the power of self-determination. The subjects of governments “under the absolute and arbitrary direction of one man,” the newspaper writer of 1747 commented,

  are all slaves, for he that is obliged to act or not to act according to the arbitrary will and pleasure of a governor, or his director, is as much a slave as he who is obliged to act or not according to the arbitrary will and pleasure of a master or his overseer. And indeed, I never see anything of the kind but it gives me a lively idea of an overseer directing a plantation of Negroes in the West Indies; the only difference I know is that the slaves of the latter deserve highly to be pitied, the slaves of the former to be held in the utmost contempt.

  The degradation of chattel slaves — painfully visible and unambiguously established in law — was only the final realization of what the loss of freedom could mean everywhere; for there was no such thing “as partial liberty”: he who has authority “to restrain and control my conduct in any instance without my consent hath in all.” From this point of view it made little difference whether one’s bondage was private or public, civil or political, or even whether one was treated poorly or well. Anyone “who is bound to obey the will of another,” Stephen Hopkins wrote, is “as really a slave though he may have a good master as if he had a bad one; and this is stronger in politic bodies than in natural ones, as the former have perpetual succession and remain the same; and although they may have a very good master at one time, they may have a very bad one at another.”3

  The presence of an enslaved Negro population in America inevitably became a political issue where slavery had this general meaning. The contrast between what political leaders in the colonies sought for themselves and what they imposed on, or at least tolerated in, others became too glaring to be ignored and could not be lightened by appeals to the Lockean justification of slavery as the favorable fate of people who “by some act that deserves death” had forfeited their lives and had been spared by the generosity of their captors.4 The reality of plantation life was too harsh for such fictions. The identification between the cause of the colonies and the cause of the Negroes bound in chattel slavery — an identification built into the very language of politics — became inescapable.

  It was not grasped by all at once, nor did it become effective evenly through the colonies. But gradually the contradiction between the proclaimed principles of freedom and the facts of life in America became generally recognized. How embarrassing this obvious discrepancy could be to enthusiastic libertarians was revealed early in the period. What could the Colonel (Richard Bland) mean, the Reverend John Camm demanded to know, by asserting that under an English government “all men are born free”? Does he mean

  that Virginia is not an English government, or that Negroes are not under it born slaves, or that the said slaves are not men? Whichever of these confident assertions he undertakes to maintain, and one of them he must maintain, he will find insuperable difficulties to oppose him as soon as he is able to cast an eye on the situation of Virginia, the map of America, or on the condition and rational conduct of his own domestics.5

  It was an unanswerable argument — but Camm did not choose to pursue it. Few in the South did; for while everyone believed in liberty and everyone knew that slavery was its denial, everyone knew also, as a South Carolinian wrote in 1774, that the abolition of slavery would “complete the ruin of many American provinces, as well as the West India islands.” Few even of the most enlightened Virginians were willing to declare, as Jefferson did in the instructions he wrote for his colony’s delegation to the first Continental Congress, that “the rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice” and that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state”; fewer still lent active support to the developing antislavery movement, however logically it followed from the principles of the Revolution. But though Patrick Henry, like the majority of his neighbors, felt that “the general inconvenience of living here without them” rendered the freeing of slaves in the south impractical, nevertheless he could not ignore the contradiction involved in maintaining slavery “at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision in a country above all others fond of liberty”; and, confessing his own guilt and inconsistency, he wrote that he looked forward to the time “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.” Even in the South the contagion of liberty spread to the institution of chattel slavery in no way directly involved in the controversy with England; even in the South there would be efforts, as a result, in some degree to control it.6

  It was in the northern and middle colonies, however, that arguments against slavery explicitly associated with the Anglo-American political controversy were heard throughout the period, increased steadily in number and intensity, and resulted in material alterations. At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets. While Boston merchants in 1764 were still content to speak in a matter-of-fact way of the economics of the slave trade, James Otis, following out the idea that “by the law of nature” all men are “free born” concluded that by “all men” was meant all human beings “white or black,” and he launched forthwith a brief but characteristically fierce attack upon the whole institution of slavery.

  Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool instead of Christian hair … help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face? Nothing better can be s
aid in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant …

  So corrupting is the evil, he concluded, that “those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own” — which explains, he added, the “ferocity, cruelty, and brutal barbarity that has long marked the general character of the sugar islanders.” The only idea of government such people can have is that which they see “exercised over ten thousand of their fellow men, born with the same right to freedom and the sweet enjoyments of liberty and life as their unrelenting task-masters, the overseers and planters.”7

  At this point, however, the argument, though logical, was still a digression in the Anglo-American debate; the explicit association of the political claims of the colonists with attacks on chattel slavery was not as yet automatically made even in the North. So, in 1765, the Reverend Stephen Johnson of Lyme, Connecticut, preaching on “the general nature and consequences of enslaving measures” and dilating on the iniquity of slavery and on its “shocking ill effects and terrible consequences” to both enslavers and enslaved, drew his illustrations from the Bible, from ancient history, “the oppression of Holland,” and the histories of France and of England under “former popish reigns” but not from the life around him; he confined his “application” of these principles and illustrations to “the impending calamities which threaten us”: he did not mention the enslavement of Negroes in America. Similarly, John Dickinson, having defined taxation without representation as “a state of the most abject slavery,” declared that he could not conceive of “an idea of a slavery more complete, more miserable, more disgraceful, than that of a people where justice is administered, government exercised, and a standing army maintained AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PEOPLE, and yet WITHOUT THE LEAST DEPENDENCE UPON THEM” — an opinion Arthur Lee echoed, also without making the connection between politics and social institutions.8