The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  Yet nowhere, at any time in the colonial years, were the implications of these circumstances articulated or justified. The assumption remained that society, in its maturity if not in its confused infancy, would conform to the pattern of the past; that authority would continue to exist without challenge, and that those in superior positions would be responsible and wise, and those beneath them respectful and content. These premises and expectations were deeply lodged; they were not easily or quickly displaced. But the Revolution brought with it arguments and attitudes bred of arguments endlessly repeated, that undermined these premises of the ancien régime.

  For a decade or more defiance to the highest constituted powers poured from the colonial presses and was hurled from half the pulpits of the land. The right, the need, the absolute obligation to disobey legally constituted authority had become the universal cry. Cautions and qualifications became ritualistic: formal exercises in ancient pieties. One might preface one’s charge to disobedience with homilies on the inevitable imperfections of all governments and the necessity to bear “some injuries” patiently and peaceably. But what needed and received demonstration and defense was not the caution, but the injunction: the argument that when injuries touched on “fundamental rights” (and who could say when they did not?) then nothing less than “duty to God and religion, to themselves, to the community, and to unborn posterity require such to assert and defend their rights by all lawful, most prudent, and effectual means in their power.” Obedience as a principle was only too well known; disobedience as a doctrine was not. It was therefore asserted again and again that resistance to constituted authority was “a doctrine according to godliness — the doctrine of the English nation … by which our rights and constitution have often been defended and repeatedly rescued out of the hands of encroaching tyranny … This is the doctrine and grand pillar of the ever memorable and glorious Revolution, and upon which our gracious sovereign GEORGE III holds the crown of the British empire.” What better credentials could there be? How lame to add that obedience too “is an eminent part of Christian duty without which government must disband and dreadful anarchy and confusion (with all its horrors) take place and reign without control” — how lame, especially in view of the fact that one could easily mistake this “Christian obedience” for that “blind, enslaving obedience which is no part of the Christian institution but is highly injurious to religion, to every free government, and to the good of mankind, and is the stirrup of tyranny, and grand engine of slavery.”70

  Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went. Its greatest intensification took place in the explosive atmosphere of local religious dissent. Isaac Backus spoke only for certain of the Baptists and Congregational Separates and against the presumptive authority of ministers, when, in the course of an attack on the religious establishment in Massachusetts, he warned that

  we are not to obey and follow [ministers] in an implicit or customary way, but each one must consider and follow others no further than they see that the end of their conversation is Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever more … People are so far from being under obligation to follow teachers who don’t lead in this way they incur guilt by such a following of them.

  It took little imagination on the part of Backus’ readers and listeners to find in this a general injunction against uncritical obedience to authority in any form. Others were even more explicit. The Baptist preacher who questioned not merely the authority of the local orthodox church but the very “etymology of the word [orthodoxy]” assured the world that the colonists

  have as just a right, before GOD and man, to oppose King, ministry, Lords, and Commons of England when they violate their rights as Americans as they have to oppose any foreign enemy; and that this is no more, according to the law of nature, to be deemed rebellion than it would be to oppose the King of France, supposing him now present invading the land.

  But what to the Baptists was the establishment, to Anglicans was dissent. From the establishment in New England, ever fearful of ecclesiastical impositions from without, came as strong a current of anti-authoritarianism as from the farthest left-wing sect. It was a pillar of the temple, a scion of the church, and an apologist for New England’s standing order who sweepingly disclaimed “all human authority in matters of faith and worship. We regard neither pope nor prince as head of the church, nor acknowledge that any Parliaments have power to enact articles of doctrine or forms of discipline or modes of worship or terms of church communion,” and, declaring that “we are accountable to none but Christ” — words that had struck at the heart of every establishment, civil and religious, since the fall of Rome — concluded with the apparent paradox that “liberty is the fundamental principle of our establishment.”71

  In such declarations a political argument became a moral imperative. The principle of justifiable disobedience and the instinct to question public authority before accepting it acquired a new sanction and a new vigor. Originally, of course, the doctrine of resistance was applied to Parliament, a nonrepresentative assembly 3,000 miles away. But the composition and location of the institution had not been as crucial in creating opposition as had the character of the actions Parliament had taken. Were provincial assemblies, simply because they were local and representative, exempt from scrutiny and resistance? Were they any less susceptible than Parliament to the rule that when their authority is extended beyond “the bounds of the law of God and the free constitution … ‘their acts are, ipso facto, void, and cannot oblige any to obedience’”? There could be no doubt of the answer. Any legislature, wherever located or however composed, deserved only the obedience it could command by the justice and wisdom of its proceedings. Representative or not, local or not, any agency of the state could be defied. The freeholders of Augusta, Virginia, could not have been more explicit in applying to local government in 1776 the defiance learned in the struggle with Parliament. They wrote their delegates to Virginia’s Provincial Congress that

  should the future conduct of our legislative body prove to you that our opinion of their wisdom and justice is ill-grounded, then tell them that your constituents are neither guided nor will ever be influenced by that slavish maxim in politics, “that whatever is enacted by that body of men in whom the supreme power of the state is vested must in all cases be obeyed,” and that they firmly believe attempts to repeal an unjust law can be vindicated beyond a simple remonstrance addressed to the legislators.72

  But such threats as these were only the most obvious ways in which traditional notions of authority came into question. Others were more subtly subversive, silently sapping the traditional foundations of social orders and discipline.

  “Rights” obviously lay at the heart of the Anglo-American controversy: the rights of Englishmen, the rights of mankind, chartered rights. But “rights,” wrote Richard Bland — that least egalitarian of Revolutionary leaders — “imply equality in the instances to which they belong and must be treated without respect to the dignity of the persons concerned in them.” This was by no means simply a worn cliché, for while “equality before the law” was a commonplace of the time, “equality without respect to the dignity of the persons concerned” was not; its emphasis on social equivalence was significant, and though in its immediate context the remark was directed to the invidious distinctions believed to have been drawn between Englishmen and Americans its broader applicability was apparent. Others seized upon it, and developed it, especially in the fluid years of transition when new forms of government were being sought to replace those believed to have proved fatal to liberty. “An affectation of rank” and “the assumed distinction of ‘men of consequence’” had been the blight of the Proprietary party, a Pennsylvania pamphleteer wrote in 1776. Riches in a new country like America signified nothing more than the accident of prior settlement. The accumulation of wealth had been “unavoidable to the descendants of the early settlers” since the land
, originally cheap, had appreciated naturally with the growth of settlement.

  Perhaps it is owing to this accidental manner of becoming rich that wealth does not obtain the same degree of influence here which it does in old countries. Rank, at present, in America is derived more from qualification than property; a sound moral character, amiable manners, and firmness in principle constitute the first class, and will continue to do so till the origin of families be forgotten, and the proud follies of the old world overrun the simplicity of the new.

  Therefore, under the new dispensation, “no reflection ought to be made on any man on account of birth, provided that his manners rises decently with his circumstances, and that he affects not to forget the level he came from.”73

  The idea was, in its very nature, corrosive to the traditional authority of magistrates and of established institutions. And it activated other, similar thoughts whose potential threat to stability lay till then inert. There was no more familiar notion in eighteenth-century political thought — it was propounded in every tract on government and every ministerial exhortation to the civil magistracy — than that those who wield power were “servants of society” as well as “ministers of God,” and as such had to be specially qualified: they must be acquainted with the affairs of men; they must have wisdom, knowledge, prudence; and they must be men of virtue and true religion.74 But how far should one go with this idea? The doctrine that the qualifications for magistracy were moral, spiritual, and intellectual could lead to conflict with the expectation that public leaders would be people of external dignity and social superiority; it could be dangerous to the establishment in any settled society. For the ancient notion that leadership must devolve on men whose “personal authority and greatness,” whose “eminence or nobility,” were such that “every man subordinate is ready to yield a willing submission without contempt or repining” — ordinary people not easily conceding to an authority “conferred upon a mean man … no better than selected out of their own rank” — this traditional notion had never been repudiated, was still honored and repeated. But now, in the heated atmosphere of incipient rebellion, the idea of leaders as servants of the people was pushed to its logical extreme, and its subversive potentialities revealed. By 1774 it followed from the belief that “lawful rulers are the servants of the people” that they were “exalted above their brethren not for their own sakes, but for the benefit of the people; and submission is yielded, not on account of their persons considered exclusively on the authority they are clothed with, but of those laws which in the exercise of this authority are made by them conformably to the laws of nature and equity.” In the distribution of offices, it was said in 1770, “merit only in the candidate” should count — not birth, or wealth, or loyalty to the great; but merit only. Even a deliberately judicious statement of this theme rang with defiance to traditional forms of authority: “It is not wealth — it is not family — it is not either of these alone, nor both of them together, though I readily allow neither is to be disregarded, that will qualify men for important seats in government, unless they are rich and honorable in other and more important respects.” Indeed, one could make a complete inversion and claim that, properly, the external affluence of magistrates should be the consequence of, not the prior qualification for, the judicious exercise of public authority over others.75

  Where would it end? Two generations earlier, in the fertile seedtime of what would become the Revolutionary ideology, the ultimate subversiveness of the arguments advanced by “the men of the rights” had already been glimpsed. “The sum of the matter betwixt Mr. Hoadly and me,” the Jacobite, High Church polemicist Charles Leslie had written in 1711, is this:

  I think it most natural that authority should descend, that is, be derived from a superior to an inferior, from God to fathers and kings, and from kings and fathers to sons and servants. But Mr. Hoadly would have it ascend from sons to fathers and from subjects to sovereigns, nay to God himself, whose kingship the men of the rights say is derived to Him from the people! And the argument does naturally carry it all that way. For if authority does ascend, it must ascend to the height.76

  By 1774 it seemed undeniable to many, uninvolved in or hostile to the Revolutionary effort, that declarations “before GOD … that it is no rebellion to oppose any king, ministry, or governor [who] destroys by any violence or authority whatever the rights of the people” threatened the most elemental principles of order and discipline in society.77 A group of writers, opposed not merely to the politics of resistance but to the effect it would have on the primary linkages of society — on that patterning of human relations that distinguishes a civilized community from a primitive mob — attempted to recall to the colonists the lessons of the past, the wisdom, as they thought of it, of the ages. Citing adages and principles that once had guided men’s thoughts on the structure of society; equating all communities, and England’s empire in particular, with families; quoting generously from Filmer if not from Leslie; and explaining that anarchy results when social inferiors claim political authority, they argued, with increasing anxiety, that the essence of social stability was being threatened by the political agitation of the time. Their warnings, full of nostalgia for ancient certainties, were largely ignored. But in the very extremism of their reaction to the events of the time there lies a measure of the distance Revolutionary thought had moved from an old to a very new world.

  One of the earliest such warnings was written by a young Barbadian, Isaac Hunt, only recently graduated from the College of Philadelphia but already an expert in scurrilous pamphleteering. Opening his Political Family, an essay published in 1775 though written for a prize competition in 1766, with a discourse on the necessary reciprocity of parts in the body politic he developed as his central point the idea that “in the body politic all inferior jurisdictions should flow from one superior fountain … a due subordination of the less parts to the greater is … necessary to the existence of BOTH.” Colonies were the children and inferiors of the mother country; let them show the gratitude and obedience due to parents, and so let the principle of order through subordination prevail in the greater as in the lesser spheres of life.78

  This, in the context of the widespread belief in equal rights and the compact theory of government, was anachronistic. But it expressed the fears of many as political opposition turned into revolutionary fervor. Arguments such as Hunt’s were enlarged and progressively dramatized, gaining in vituperation with successive publications until by 1774 they were bitter, shrill, and full of despair. Three Anglican clergymen wrote wrathful epitaphs to this ancient, honorable, and moribund philosophy.

  Samuel Seabury — Hamilton’s anonymous opponent in the pamphlet wars and the future first bishop of the Episcopal Church in America — wrote desperately of the larger, permanent dangers of civil disobedience. The legal, established authorities in New York — the courts of justice, above all — have been overthrown, he wrote, and in their places there were now “delegates, congresses, committees, riots, mobs, insurrections, associations.” Who comprised the self-constituted Committee of Safety of New York that had the power to brand innocent people outlaws and deliver them over “to the vengeance of a lawless, outrageous mob, to be tarred, feathered, hanged, drawn, quartered, and burnt”? A parcel of upstarts “chosen by the weak, foolish, turbulent part of the country people” — “half a dozen fools in your neighborhood.” Was the slavery imposed by their riotous wills to be preferred to the tyranny of a king? No: “If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin.” If the upstart, pretentious committeemen triumph, order and peace will be at an end, and anarchy will result.

  Government was intended for the security of those who live under it — to protect the weak against the strong — the good against the bad — to preserve order and decency among men, preventing every one from injuring his neighbor. Every person, then, owes obedience to the laws of the government under which he lives, and is ob
liged in honor and duty to support them. Because if one has a right to disregard the laws of the society to which he belongs, all have the same right; and then government is at an end.79

  His colleague, the elegant, scholarly Thomas Bradbury Chandler, was at once cleverer, more thoughtful, and, for those who heeded arguments, more likely to have been convincing. Two of his pamphlets published in 1774 stated with peculiar force the traditional case for authority in the state, in society, and in the ultimate source and ancient archetype of all authority, the family. His American Querist, that extraordinary list of one hundred rhetorical questions, put the point obliquely. It asked:

  Whether some degree of respect be not always due from inferiors to superiors, and especially from children to parents; and whether the refusal of this on any occasion be not a violation of the general laws of society, to say nothing here of the obligations of religion and morality?

  And is not Great Britain in the same relation to the colonies as a parent to children? If so, how can such “disrespectful and abusive treatment from children” be tolerated? God has given no dispensation to people under any government “to refuse honor or custom or tribute to whom they are due; to contract habits of thinking and speaking evil of dignities, and to weaken the natural principle of respect for those in authority.” God’s command is clear: his will is that we “submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake; and require[s] us on pain of damnation to be duly subject to the higher powers, and not to resist their lawful authority.”

  Chandler’s Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans was more direct. It touched the central theme of authority at the start, and immediately spelled out the implications of resistance. The effort “to disturb or threaten an established government by popular insurrections and tumults has always been considered and treated, in every age and nation of the world, as an unpardonable crime.” Did not an Apostle, “who had a due regard for the rights and liberties of mankind,” order submission even to that cruelest of all despots, Nero? And properly so: “The bands of society would be dissolved, the harmony of the world confounded, and the order of nature subverted, if reverence, respect, and obedience might be refused to those whom the constitution has vested with the highest authority.”80