The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  The same charge came from other sources. To the Baptists’ clamor was added in 1774 a Presbyterian voice at least as sharp and shrill as theirs. In his Freedom from Civil and Ecclesiastical Slavery, the Purchase of Christ, Jonathan Parsons, the dour, eloquent, fiercely predestinarian New Light preacher of Newburyport, turned a sermon commemorating the Boston Massacre into a memorable plea for religious freedom. He spoke in defense of those “true” Calvinists, of whom he was a leader, believed to be heterodox by the establishment but known among themselves to be the only truly orthodox. They had refused to take refuge within the official categories of dissent, and consequently had been taxed for the support of an establishment not of their own choosing. “If this is not enslaving men in their most important interests, in the name of wonder, what is?” Was it not a shocking inconsistency “that a province which holds an ecclesiastical tyranny beyond all her sister colonies should be foremost in her attempts for civil liberty”? The evil must be expunged if any hope is to be held for success in the cause of civil liberty, “for while we plead for liberty on one hand and promote slavery on the other, our principles are too contracted and corrupt; and if we regard oppression in our hearts the Lord will not hear us.” The church as well as the state “must be founded on principles of justice, benevolence, and moderation, or there can be no peace … O that court and country may break through the prejudices and selfishness of the age!”37

  The pressure was powerful; and though the politics of the later Revolutionary years would permit a partial establishment of religion to persist in Massachusetts, the ultimate conclusion everywhere was clear. The disestablishment of religion was neither an original goal nor completely a product of the Revolution. Its roots lay deep in the colonial past, in circumstances that Jonathan Parsons described as a “random way of settling ministers and churches, together with a vile contempt of creeds and confessions … all seem to jumble together, and make mere hodgepodge.” These unplanned, unexpected conditions, lacking in completeness and justification, were touched by the magic of Revolutionary thought, and were transformed. Our ancestors learned through their own suffering and the example of England, Samuel Williams wrote in his prophetic Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1775),

  what must be the effect of endeavoring to enforce uniformity in doctrine or discipline. This, with the gradual improvement of the human mind that has since taken place, has been leading these colonies into that truly righteous and catholic principle, universal toleration and liberty of conscience; which, if not already perfect, we are in the sure path to.

  No doubt “the fierce and bigoted” of every denomination will remain inflamed with a desire to establish themselves at the expense of others. But their efforts will never succeed. “The different parties among us will subsist, and grow up into more large and respectable bodies. And the mutual interests and wisdom of all cannot fail to perfect that universal toleration and liberty of conscience which is so generally and well begun.”38

  3. THE DEMOCRACY UNLEASHED

  If some were elevated and invigorated by the support given to antislavery and disestablishment sentiment by the extension of the colonists’ constitutional arguments, others were dismayed and felt threatened. Slaveholders were generally alarmed, and sought to check when they could not simply ignore such disturbing ramifications of thought. Anglicans in Virginia and Congregationalists in Massachusetts found fields other than religion in which to follow out the implications of their views on civil liberty. Yet the threat in both cases was limited, for the ultimate consequences were known, and the possibility of standing fast — for the present at least — remained. But there was another area — an area more directly relevant to the central constitutional questions of the Revolution than either of these — in which such limitations did not exist: where the possibility of standing fast did not remain; where the ultimate resolution of thought could not easily be seen; where the familiar meaning of ideas and words faded away into confusion, and leaders felt themselves peering into a haze, seeking to bring shifting conceptions somehow into focus.

  “You and I, my dear friend,” John Adams wrote in 1776, “have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government … When! before the present epocha, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?”39 But how fair in fact was the opportunity? Everyone knew the basic prescription for a wise and just government. It was so to balance the contending powers in society that no one power could overwhelm the others and, unchecked, destroy the liberties that belonged to all. The problem was how to arrange the institutions of government so that this balance could be achieved.

  For Americans the ideal solution had been England’s “mixed” government, in which major elements of society formed a self-balancing equilibrium of governmental institutions. The question that emerged with unanticipated urgency after 1775 was how this solution could apply in the new governments of the American states. For the primary assumptions that had been made concerning the nature of the basic social forces in the state could no longer be maintained. Factions, interests, pressure groups of course existed in eighteenth-century America as they do in the twentieth century. But these, to eighteenth-century minds, were the burdensome impedimenta, the unfortunate but more or less less inevitable details of public life which must be borne but need scarcely be dignified by a place in formal political thought; only occasionally were they included, except by way of denunciation, in political and constitutional theory. The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth-century English thought. The primary units of politics, they believed, were the three basic orders of society corresponding to the three basic forms of government: royalty, the nobility, and the commons. These formal strata were distinct in composition and interests. Royalty was unique in its sanctity and prerogative power; it stood for order and authority, and it symbolized and unified the state. The commons had the power of numbers and of productivity; it was unique in promoting liberty and individual expression. The nobility, centrally important to the constitution, had a stalwart independence guaranteed by inherited wealth and status which enabled it to mediate the powerful conflicts generated above and below; it acted as a balance wheel, preventing the commons, on the one hand, from turning society into a licentious mob, and the crown, on the other, from becoming tyrannical. Each was essential, and equally essential, in achieving the equilibrium in government that brings tranquility and happiness to all; but any of them, released from the counter-pressures of the others, would degenerate — into a tyranny, or into a self-aggrandizing oligarchy, or into an anarchic democracy destructive, in the end, to liberty as well as to property. Somehow, through great historic struggles, these social forces had been brought into the English government in a perfect balance, and it was this that accounted, it was believed, for the political stability that nation enjoyed.40

  This constitutional miracle the colonists felt they shared, for they too lived within the jurisdiction of the British government. But they lived also within their own immediate governments, and therein lay a problem that many had recognized from the earliest years but that became acute only after 1763 when the foundations of government in America came under intense scrutiny. It had long been known that the balance of social forces in the colonial polities were peculiarly skewed, for one of the basic components did not exist in proper form. The commons was obviously and vigorously present; and so too was the crown in the person of the King’s vicegerent, the governor; but the nobility was not. Who could qualify? It was generally agreed that the members of the House of Lords were “peers of England and not of America,” and while a few noblemen had lived in the colonies from time to time, these individuals could scarcely be mistaken for an order of A
merican society: even if their numbers had been sufficient, their status and political role in the colonies would not have been.41 Nowhere in eighteenth-century America had the legal attributes of nobility been recognized or perpetuated. The law made no provision for hereditary privileges; no office of government had been guaranteed by birth. Indeed, the situation was almost exactly the reverse of the traditional, for the group closest to a privileged order in the colonies were the councilors, the governors’ advisors and members of the upper chambers of the legislatures, but their identity as a social group was the creation, rather than the creator, of their role in government. In a number of colonies a few families had tended to dominate the Councils; but they had less legal right to do so than certain royal officials who, though hardly members of an American nobility, sat on the Councils by virtue of their offices. Councilors could be and were removed by simple political maneuver. Council seats were filled either by appointment or election: when appointive, they were vulnerable to political pressure in England; when elective, to the vagaries of public opinion at home. As there were no special privileges, no peculiar group possessions, manners, or attitudes to distinguish councilors from other affluent Americans, so there were no separate political interests expressed in the Councils as such.

  Yet these were the bodies expected to maintain, by their independence from pressures generated above and below, the balance of the whole. The fact that they could not do so had been considered a major failing of colonial government from the early years of the century, though precisely in what way differed according to the colony examined and the point of view of the examiner. In the colonies in which the Councils were appointed by the crown, the results were deplored with particular vehemence by those who stood on the side of the commons. Richard Henry Lee’s description of the situation in Virginia was typical. The constitution of Virginia, he explained to his brother Arthur Lee in 1766, was modeled on the excellent pattern of England’s. “But unhappily for us, my brother, it is an exterior semblance only; when you examine separately the parts that compose this government, essential variations appear between it and the happily poised English constitution.” In Britain, the King, with his executive powers, and the Commons, “representing the democratic interest,” are prevented from overextending their claims

  by a powerful body of nobles, independent in the material circumstances of hereditary succession to their titles and seats in the second bench of the legislature … With us, the legislative power is lodged in a governor, Council, and House of Burgesses. The two first [are] appointed by the crown, and their places held by the precarious tenure of pleasure [of the crown] only. That security therefore which the constitution derives in Britain from the House of Lords is here entirely wanting, and the just equilibrium totally destroyed by two parts out of three of the legislature being in the same hands.42

  The analysis was a commonplace of the time, and so too was the conclusion. Councilors of the royal colonies, one pamphleteer wrote in the same year, being “proud of the dignity annexed to their office and fond of maintaining such a flattering superiority … naturally become tools of that ministry upon whose favor their very existence depends, since the same power which raised them to their exalted rank can, for a single act of disobedience, sink them into their original obscurity.” The result, it was widely agreed, was that in the royal colonies where the councilors “are the meanest creatures and tools in the political creation, dependent every moment for their existence on the tainted breath of a prime minister … the crown has really two branches of our legislature in its power,” a situation, which, if it ever became universal and fully exploited, would result in the death of liberty in America. But the complaints in the royal colonies came not only from representatives of “the democracy.” Royal officials also objected when they discovered that in order to run their governments at all they had to appoint to their Councils local leaders whose interests proved to be indistinguishable from those of the lower House.43

  Such complaints by crown officials were as nothing, however, next to those that emanated from Massachusetts, where the Council was elected by the Assembly. From Francis Bernard, governor of the Bay Colony during the Stamp Act troubles, and others in his administration, came a stream of bitter denunciations of “the constitutional imbecility of the Council.” With such a perverted middle chamber, Bernard wrote after an electoral purge of the Council, good government could not possibly exist. If councilors continued “to be turned out of their places whenever they exercise[d] the dictates of their own judgments in contravention to the fury of a seditious demagogue,” the result would be anarchy.44

  As the Anglo-American troubles multiplied and greater control over government was sought by officialdom on the one hand and popular leaders on the other, more and more thought was given to the means by which “an independent and honest middle branch of legislature” might be created capable of resisting both “the exuberances of popular liberty and … the stretches of the government party when … either advanced beyond the constitutional line of propriety.” Remedies were sought for this constitutional weakness, and proposals were made that reached into the roots of American society. A number of writers came to the conclusion that the only solution was the creation of a privileged social order from which the members of the Council could be chosen. Ideally, Governor Bernard wrote, a hereditary nobility should be created in the colonies. And though he acknowledged that America was not yet “(and probably will not be for many years to come) ripe enough for an hereditary nobility,” he saw no reason why “a nobility for life” could not be established at once. A life peerage “would probably give strength and stability to the American governments as effectually as an hereditary nobility does to that of Great Britain.” It was a logical idea, which others too came to believe was the solution to a crucial problem of government. In New York the scurrilous attacker of Alexander McDougall, the pseudo-Wilkes, attributed much of the current troubles to the fact that England’s “AUGUST PEERAGE … does not obtain, with its due weight, in the royal colonies.” Its pale imitation, the Council, is “equal in legislative and judicial authority; but in influence, privileges and stability, vastly inferior.” No one, surely, unless his principles were “verging to democracy” — (“God forbid that we should ever be so miserable as to sink into a republic!”) — would wish anything but strength for this “essential though imperfect branch of the mixed monarchy.” Let us hope that “with the increase of numbers and opulence” the colonies will achieve “a perfect copy of that bright original which is the envy and admiration of the world!” And the one thing, above all others, that would advance the progress toward that goal would be the vesting of the councilors “with their offices for life.”45

  Andrew Oliver, the provincial secretary of Massachusetts and a close political ally of Bernard, in less rhetorical language, went further. In one of the letters whose publication as a pamphlet in 1773 so inflamed public opinion in Massachusetts he stated that the necessary independence of the middle branch could never be achieved under the present circumstances. A way must be found “to put a man of fortune above the common level and exempt him from being chosen by the people into the lower offices” where he might be subject to popular intimidation. The best solution, as he saw it, was to create “an order of patricians or esquires … to be all men of fortune or good landed estates” appointed to that rank for life by act of the governor and Council; from among this social order members of the Council would be chosen, and on them would be bestowed “a title one degree above that of esquire.”

  Many, of course, disagreed with such proposals. John Adams believed that arguments in favor of creating an American life peerage were part of the general plot against liberty hatched in the corrupt centers of power in England and America. But ideas in favor of creating some kind of social basis for constitutional balance were widespread, even among those who opposed the strengthening of English power in America. William Drayton, who knew well enough that the colonies did “not
yet desire dignities, lordships, and dukedoms,” believed that the main constitutional difficulty in the colonies lay in the appointment to Council seats of “more strangers from England than men of rank in the colony,” and urged that councilors be appointed for life from among those qualified not only by local birth and residence but by local property in sufficient quantity to distinguish them in an unmistakable way from the population at large and make them independent of pressures and temptations from any source.46

  The idea that constitutional liberty was bound up with the mediating political power of a privileged social order persisted into the turmoil of the Revolutionary crisis,47 but it came under new pressures and was challenged by the more advanced thinkers of the time. If America breaks free of English control, it was asked, what would become of the liberty-preserving balance? What elements would there be to be balanced? Monarchy as a social order would obviously be gone. The commons, on the other hand, would most certainly and substantially be there. And that great guarantor of liberty, the middle order?

  The idea that the newly independent American states, conceived in the spirit of equal rights and privileges and formed out of a remarkably equalitarian tradition, would deliberately create a privileged order was unthinkable. It was even ludicrous, as the Tory author of What Think Ye of the Congress Now? exuberantly pointed out in analyzing the Continental Congress’s activities. “An American House of Lords is in agitation,” he wrote, to be composed of hereditary “orders of the American nobility.”