The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  There were almost as many variations in these constitutional programs attempting somehow to restrain the force of “the democracy” within a republican system as there were writers, for all proposals had to be extemporized from unevenly applicable models in circumstances imperfectly understood. Braxton was alarmed at the “democratical” tendencies of Adams’ thought, and Adams was horrified by the same drift in Paine’s. There were depths below depths, and at the very bottom of the descent from a mixed monarchy manqué to a total repudiation of complexity and balance in society and government was an ill-written pamphlet of thirteen pages published, probably in New England, without identification of author, printer, or place of publication.

  Dedicated “to the honest farmer and citizen,” The People the Best Governors developed, incompletely yet repetitiously, the theme stated in its title. “The people know best their own wants and necessities, and therefore are best able to rule themselves.” They must themselves directly control all branches of government, and if the dispersal of population makes representation necessary, safeguards must immediately be erected against any effort of the representatives to act independently of the people. It must be firmly established that the power of representatives “ought never to extend any farther than barely the making of laws,” and that they were never to create by their own determination additional organs of government. They might appoint a Council, but only for purposes of advice: “for the representatives to appoint a Council with a negative authority is to give away that power which they have no right to do, because they themselves derived it from the people.” It would amount to the creation of an independent upper chamber of the legislature: but what, or whom, could such a body represent? It too would be “virtually the representatives of the people,” and as such could not be empowered by any other body than the electorate.61

  But it was in Pennsylvania in 1776 that the full range of possibilities in devising governmental institutions proper for a society lacking the traditional orders of men was most fully explored and most lucidly explained, and it was there that the transformation of the framework within which all this thought proceeded could be most clearly seen.

  Some in Pennsylvania, accepting forthrightly the radical implications of the revolutionary situation but still thinking in traditional terms, concluded that in the American situation “a well-regulated democracy,” of all forms of government, “is most equitable.” How could it be otherwise? The constitution of Pennsylvania could scarcely make provision for “a representative of a king, for we have none; nor can there be need of a council to represent the house of lords, for we have not, and hope never shall have, a hereditary nobility different from the body of the people.” To make “places of power” a prerogative of birth was poor policy indeed, for “wisdom is not a birthright”; nor was life tenure in office advisable since “men’s abilities and manners may change.” The fact that other governments have “something, a senate, a council, or upper house,” was no reason for Pennsylvania to have one too. “Free government can better, much better, subsist without it. Different branches of legislature cause much needless expense, two ways: first, as there are more persons to maintain; and second, as they waste time and prolong a session by their contentions.” If Rome had been a “true democracy, without a senate,” it would have lasted longer, and now if Americans were to “admit different branches of legislature” the result might well be just the sort of civic degeneration that has taken place in England. The direction thought should take in the present transactions in America (“the most important … in any nation for some centuries past”) was toward a “truly popular government” where rotation in office would be mandatory and continuous, and where officeholders would be held to strict accountability. Above all, let the organization of government be simple. At present we have no estate of hereditary privilege. If, nevertheless, we create an organ of government modeled on those that elsewhere have served the political interests of privileged orders, there will soon be some here who will learn how to maintain control of such an institution, and in time become used to thinking of it as somehow peculiarly their own. In the end, therefore, Pennsylvanians may discover that they have artificially created what fate had mercifully spared them.62

  Another writer, sharing the same assumptions, went to the opposite extreme, proposing an elaborate system of “three different bodies,” an assembly, a senate, and a council, all of which were to have initiating and vetoing powers in legislation.63 But the future lay with two other Pennsylvania writers, one of whom expressed clearly what was becoming a general agreement concerning the character of the second chamber in an American republic, an agreement which constitution writers would struggle to express adequately in institutions in the years that followed, and the other of whom pointed directly to what, evolving logically from the breakdown of traditional notions of the social basis of English constitutionalism, would become the fundamental conception of a new theory of politics.

  The first writer, observing that the colony had “but one order of freemen in it,” argued historically, with evidence quoted wholesale from a book published five years earlier in England, that “the best model that human wisdom, improved by experience, has left them to copy” was “the old Saxon form of government” which had been transferred from “the German woods … into England about the year four hundred and fifty.” At that time England had been a society of “small republics” within which the entire population, “being all equally interested in every question,” had met often in council for full and equal discussion, and from which deputies had been sent to “a national Council and legislative authority.” Let Pennsylvania’s government be the same as this “beautiful system.” Let there be extreme decentralization of political power, frequent elections by secret ballot, open debates in assemblies, popularly elected and moderately paid judges and local officers, and militia armies with elected field commanders. As for the perplexing question of “the respective powers of the several branches of the legislature,” the most judicious arrangement would be to have, in addition to a representative assembly, a council composed of men distinguished by their “superior degree of acquaintance with the history, laws, and manners of mankind, and by that means they will be more likely to foresee the mischievous consequences that might follow a proceeding which at first view did not appear to have anything dangerous in it.” And it would also be a good idea to have, in addition, a “small privy council” to advise and assist the governor in the execution of his duties. The possibility that the members of the upper house would “inveterate themselves” could be eliminated by having them elected at short intervals, for that would give the ultimate decision to the people at large, who surely have not forgotten, nor will fail to guard against, “the mischiefs which have overspread the world, from the days of Sylla to the present bloody period, from the same tyrannic source.”64

  The substitution of knowledge, wisdom, and judgment for hereditary privileges as the necessary qualifications for membership in the second chamber of the legislature was only the beginning of a solution to the problem, however, for there was as yet no sense of how these qualities could be recognized publicly, isolated, and recruited into a particular branch of government. Nor was it clear that such a solution avoided the perpetuation of a quasi-traditional aristocracy and hence was free of inconsistency with basic Revolutionary principles, for it was difficult to throw off the assumption that superiority was unitary, that “gentlemen of education, … leisure, … wisdom, learning, and a firmness and consistency of character” were also gentlemen of “fortune.”65 But it was a solution of sorts that pressed against the boundaries of traditional ideas even if it did not penetrate much beyond them. The adumbration of a truly new configuration of ideas became visible at the same time, however, in another pamphlet dealing with the same problem, the remarkably original and cogent Four Letters on Interesting Subjects.

  The entire discussion of the effects of divisions among and within the branches of government, the
author declared, had been clouded by myths and misunderstandings. Arguments against the simplest forms of government are based on the idea that a number of houses check each other to the general advantage of all. But in fact the notion “has but little weight.” For, in the first place, such checking “tends to embarrass and prolong business”; in the second place, it may injure collective “honor and tempers, and thereby produce petulances and ill-will which a more simple form of government would have prevented”; and in the third place, “the more houses, the more parties”: different houses may serve only to institutionalize and sharpen conflicts of interests that otherwise might be reconciled. Suppose, the writer went on, “the landed interest would get into one house, and the commercial interest into the other.” The result would be that

  a perpetual and dangerous opposition would be kept up, and no business be got through. Whereas, were there a large, equal and annual representation in one house only, the different parties, by being thus blended together, would hear each others’ arguments; which advantage they cannot have if they sit in different houses. To say there ought to be two houses because there are two sorts of interest is the very reason why there ought to be but one, and that one to consist of every sort.66

  Here quietly but profoundly the ground of political thought had shifted. The writer was not a “Sidney … the ‘classical’ republican par excellence, with no feeling whatever for the shifting possibilities of political life,” and his essay was not, like the classical sources all eighteenth-century Americans venerated, “concerned with forms of government rather than with their institutions.”67 The essential units participating in the constitution were no longer abstract categories, formal orders of society derived from the assumptions of classical antiquity; they were interests, which, organized for political action, became factions and parties. Their constitutional role was not to manipulate independently a separate institution of government but to join in conflict within a single institution and “blend” themselves together into a general consensus. “Balance” was still involved, but with the repudiation of monarchy and nobility and the confinement of society to “the democracy,” the notion of what the social powers were that must be balanced and controlled was changing. What were now seen, though still only vaguely, were the shifting, transitory competitive groupings into which men of the eighteenth century actually organized themselves in the search for wealth, prestige, and power. And the concern with balance in government was shifting from a concern with social orders to that of functioning branches of government.

  This shift in ways of thinking about the social basis of politics was part of a more general turn toward realism in political and constitutional thought. By the time the debates on the first state constitutions had been concluded, the sense that public affairs were basically struggles among formal orders of society had begun to fade and with it the whole elaborate paradigm that lay at the heart of eighteenth-century political thought. To be sure, the ancient formulations that had been so deeply engraved on the eighteenth-century mind still continued to be used; Americans of 1776 still referred to the crown, the aristocracy, and the democracy as social categories basic to politics and observed that each had its own fundamental principle or spirit in government: for monarchy, fear; for aristocracy, honor; for democracy, virtue. And it was still found natural to assume that the ultimate goal of politics was a motionless equilibrium among these entities, and that public controversy deliberately undertaken was essentially malign or aberrant. But the actual problems of government the American faced were now so urgent, so new, and so comprehensive that attention was beginning to concentrate on the visible and real rather than on the traditional and theoretical. The ancient classifications remained in the back of people’s minds; but the problems posed by those disreputable and dangerous elements — factions, interests, and parties — and by the need to redefine the functions of the branches of government were more immediate and obtrusive. A republican constitution, to be successful, must somehow cope with the fact that the larger the unit of government the greater the number of contending factions and the smaller the chance that a republican government could control them. How could they be mastered or confined? What would prevent them from tearing a government to pieces? Contention as such must be understood; the struggles of men, in whatever groupings they might form, rather than in fixed social categories, must be taken into account, and the functioning of the organs of government in controlling them more fully explored. Politics in its “vague and vulgar acceptation, … referring to the wrangling debates of modern assemblies, debates which far too often turn entirely on the narrow, selfish, and servile views of party” — politics in this humble sense rather than in the traditional, “more dignified sense” must be comprehended and dealt with, not explained away as a series of momentary instabilities and aberrations in an otherwise poised and symmetrical system.68

  Constitutional thought, concentrating on the pressing need to create republican governments that would survive, tended to draw away from the effort to refine further the ancient, traditional systems, and to move toward a fresh, direct comprehension of political reality. Denied, by the urgency of new problems, the satisfactions of elaborating familiar abstractions, Americans edged toward that hard, clear realism in political thought that would reach fulfillment a decade later in the formation of the national government and achieve its classic expression in The Federalist. In the process the modern American doctrine of the separation of functioning powers would be created, and the concept of “democracy” transformed.

  4. “WHETHER SOME DEGREE OF RESPECT BE NOT ALWAYS DUE FROM INFERIORS TO SUPERIORS”

  Yet none of this — not the changes in the concepts of representation and consent, of constitutions and rights, or of sovereignty, nor the unexpected challenge to such a deeply embedded institution as slavery, nor the unplanned defiance of orthodoxy and establishment in religion, nor the tendency to forsake the traditional assumptions concerning the social basis of politics and the constitutional arrangements that followed from these assumptions — none of these developments measure fully the transforming effect of the Revolutionary movement in America, even at its inception. Beyond these specific changes were others: subtler, vaguer, and ultimately, perhaps, even more important.

  In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. No one, that is, deliberately worked for the destruction or even the substantial alteration of the order of society as it had been known. Yet it was transformed as a result of the Revolution, and not merely because Loyalist property was confiscated and redistributed, or because the resulting war destroyed the economic bases of some people’s lives and created opportunities for others that would not otherwise have existed. Seizure of Loyalist property and displacements in the economy did in fact take place, and the latter if not the former does account for a spurt in social mobility that led earlier arrivés to remark, “When the pot boils, the scum will rise.” Yet these were superficial changes; they affected a small part of the population only, and they did not alter the organization of society.

  What did now affect the essentials of social organization — what in time would help permanently to transform them — were changes in the realm of belief and attitude. The views men held toward the relationships that bound them to each other — the discipline and pattern of society — moved in a new direction in the decade before Independence.

  Americans of 1760 continued to assume, as had their predecessors for generations before, that a healthy society was a hierarchical society, in which it was natural for some to be rich and some poor, some honored and some obscure, some powerful and some weak. And it was believed that superiority was unitary, that the attributes of the favored — wealth, wisdom, power — had a natural affinity to each other, and hence that political leadership would naturally rest in the hands of the social leaders. Movement, of course, there would be: some would fall and some would rise; but manifest, external differences among men, reflecting the pr
inciple of hierarchical order, were necessary and proper, and would remain; they were intrinsic to the nature of things.

  Circumstances had pressed harshly against such assumptions. The wilderness environment from the beginning had threatened the maintenance of elaborate social distinctions; many of them in the passage of time had in fact been worn away. Puritanism, in addition, and the epidemic evangelicalism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification by generating the conviction that the ultimate quality of men was to be found elsewhere than in their external condition, and that a cosmic achievement lay within each man’s grasp. And the peculiar configuration of colonial politics — a constant broil of petty factions struggling almost formlessly, with little discipline or control, for the benefits of public authority — had tended to erode the respect traditionally accorded the institutions and officers of the state.69