The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  81. Leonard (“Massachusettensis”), in Novanglus and Massachusettensis, pp. 187–188; Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance,” A View of the Causes and Consequences, pp. lxxxiv, 504, 506, 507–508, 513n, 512n, 512–516, 511, 524, 525, 534, 535, 548, 552–553.

  82. [Daniel Leonard] (“Massachusettensis”), The Origin of the American Contest with Great-Britain … (New York, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 56), p. 24 (in Novanglus and Massachusettensis, p. 152)

  Postscript

  FULFILLMENT: A COMMENTARY ON THE CONSTITUTION

  Whatever veneration might be entertained for the body of men who formed our Constitution, the sense of that body could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution. As the instrument came from them it was nothing more than a draft of a plan, nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people, speaking through the several State Conventions. If we were to look, therefore, for the meaning of the instrument beyond the face of the instrument, we must look for it, not in the General Convention, which proposed, but in the State Conventions, which accepted and ratified the Constitution.

  — James Madison, 1796

  THE AMERICAN Constitution is the final and climactic expression of the ideology of the American Revolution. As such, in the two centuries of its existence, it has become the subject of more elaborate and detailed scrutiny and commentary than has been given to any document except the Bible. No one has mastered all the useful writings on the Constitution; no one ever will. There is too much; there is movement in too many directions at once; too many disparate issues are alive and flourishing quite independently of each other. Yet there will never be enough. The subject matters too much — matters in the sense of shaping the way we live, what we may do, and how the government may act. We must get the two-hundred-year-old story straight, in some way, in order to make sense of our own world. The Constitution, in all its aspects and ramifications, is profoundly relevant.

  But it is more than that. The writing and ratifying of the Constitution, and the original debate over its meaning, are, quite simply, fascinating. The issues are subtle, the details are often puzzling and intriguing, the movement of events complex. And the actors are remarkable. On one side, Madison, Wilson, Ellsworth, Hamilton, Jay, Iredell, the Morrises, Sherman; on the other, the junta of immensely articulate Pennsylvania antifederalists and their counterparts north and south — Melancton Smith, Luther Martin, James Winthrop, George Mason, Patrick Henry, Elbridge Gerry — the list of truly interesting actors in this drama seems endless. Part of the fascination comes from seeing these minds at work, formulating and reformulating, shifting, dodging, lunging.

  There can be no ordinary historical characterization of the complicated interplay between the maturing of Revolutionary ideas and ideals and the involvements of everyday life, which is the essence of the history of the Constitution period. Perhaps the most subtle and penetrating depiction of the inner character of the drafting of, and the original debate on, the Constitution is not a historical discourse but a poem, a short poem, by Richard Wilbur. It is called “Mind.”

  Mind in its purest play is like some bat

  That beats about in caverns all alone,

  Contriving by a kind of senseless wit

  Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

  It has no need to falter or explore;

  Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,

  And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar

  In perfect courses through the blackest air.

  And has this simile a like perfection?

  The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save

  That in the very happiest intellection

  A graceful error may correct the cave.1

  They did indeed weave and flitter, dip and soar, and they did indeed correct the cave of their ideological origins. But how?

  1

  The ideological history of the American Revolution developed in three distinct phases. Each has a voluminous documentation, and each has a distinctive focus and emphasis. The first was the years of struggle with Britain before 1776 when, under the pressure of events and the necessity to justify resistance to constituted authority, the colonists developed from their complex heritage of political thought the set of ideas, already in scattered ways familiar to them, that was most illuminating and most appropriate to their needs. Centered on the fear of centralized power and rooted in the belief that free states are fragile and degenerate easily into tyrannies unless vigilantly protected by a free, knowledgeable, and uncorrupted electorate working through institutions that balance and distribute rather than concentrate power, their ideas were critical of, and challenging to, the legal authority they had lived under. The writings of this early period drew together the basic ideas which would flow through all subsequent stages of American political thought, and provide the permanent foundation of the nation’s political beliefs.2

  The second phase saw the constructive application of these ideas and the exploration of their implications, limits, and possibilities in the writing and rewriting of the first state constitutions, from 1776 through the 1780’s. Obliged now to construct their own governments at the state level, American leaders were forced to think through the fundamentals of their beliefs, and establish republican polities that expressed the principles they had earlier endorsed. They did not work from clean slates. Constrained by institutions that had long existed and by entrenched leadership groups, they were revisers, amenders, elaborators, and conceptualizers, as they applied fresh ideas to existing structures and brought them as close as possible to their ideal. So they explored the nature of written constitutions and of constituent power; worked through the problems of separating functioning powers of government to form balances within single-order societies; and probed the nature of representation, the operative meaning of sovereignty of the people, and individual rights. Few of their conclusions were applied uniformly or in absolute and complete form. But everywhere the institutional problems of republican government at the state level and the principles on which it was based were probed in this constructive phase of the ideological revolution.3

  The third phase — the writing, debating, ratifying, and amending of the national constitution — resembles the second phase in that it was constructive and concentrated on constitution writing; many of the ideas that had been developed in the writing and discussion of the state constitutions were applied to the national constitution and further refined and developed. But in its essence this phase was distinct. For in the 1780’s, under the pressure of rising social tensions, economic confusion pointing to the possible collapse of public credit, frustration in international affairs, and the threat of dissolution of the weak Confederation, the central task was reversed. Now the goal of the initiators of change was the creation, not the destruction, of national power — the construction of what could properly be seen, and feared, as a Machtstaat, a central national power that involved armed force, the aggressive management of international relations, and, potentially at least, the regulation of vital aspects of everyday life by a government dominant over all other, lesser governments. The background experiences of constitution writing in the states were informative — they were constantly referred to in the Philadelphia convention and in the ratifying debates — but the central issue of 1787–88 was different in its nature from the main issues in the forming of the state governments, and diametrically opposite to the goals of the pre-Revolutionary years. Yet the pre-Revolutionary ideology was fundamental to all their beliefs. How could it be reconciled with present needs?

  The Founders certainly did not leave the confinement — the cave — of their own intellectual world and depart for some other. That debate and struggle with Britain was only a decade in the past. How were the original commitments to be reconciled with the radically new needs and proposals?

  What follows is not an account of the ratification debate as a whole, but a commentary on this li
mited but basic question.4 Until recently the bulk of the available documentation on the ratification debate had been quite small: four volumes of formal debates in the state ratifying conventions published by Jonathan Elliot in 1836, two volumes of pamphlets and essays published by P. L. Ford in the 1890s, and, above all, the Federalist papers, which have engrossed attention at least since the appearance of Beard’s Economic Interpretation in 1913, together with a few well-known antifederalist publications, chiefly the Federal Farmer series.5 Additions were made to the available antifederalist publications, first in Cecelia Kenyon’s collection and more comprehensively in Herbert Storing’s five volumes of documents, which include antifederalist papers from almost all of the states, and ephemera as well as systematic writings. But it was not until the appearance of the first of the projected twenty volumes of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution that it became possible to grasp the full dimensions of the outpouring of 1787–1789. The completed letterpress volumes of The Documentary History will total well over 10,000 pages — upwards of five million words — and microfiche addenda will greatly increase that total. In addition the editors have traced and identify in their annotation the reprints, whole or in part, of every published document, thus providing an index of the circulation of the writings, hence their popularity or importance as judged by contemporaries.6

  In reading through this immensity of writings, ranging from lampooning squibs and jingle-jangle verses to scholarly treatises and brilliant polemical exchanges, one easily loses track of any patterns or themes. The sheer bulk is overwhelming, for, as Henry Knox wrote at the time, “The new constitution! the new constitution is the general cry this way. Much paper is spoiled on the subject, and many essays are written which perhaps are not read by either side.”7 Storing’s edition of antifederalist writings, said to be complete, turns out in fact to include only about 15 percent of the total available antifederalist material.8 And the mass of federalist writings reveals the great range and variety of thinking on that side of the struggle, by no means all represented in the Federalist papers.9 In fact, in the full context of the political writings of 1787–88 the importance of the Federalist papers seems diminished. Some contemporaries, of course, immediately saw the merits of that long series (more than quadruple the length of any other). George Washington, a close ally of the authors, wrote prophetically to Hamilton that “when the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which attended this crisis shall have disappeared, that work will merit the notice of posterity, because in it are candidly discussed the principles of freedom.” Noah Webster thought the series “one of the most complete dissertations on government that ever has appeared in America, perhaps in Europe.” And James Iredell, one of the most penetrating minds among the federalists, called The Federalist’s treatment of standing armies “masterly” and hoped the whole work “will soon be in every body’s hands.”10

  But in the “transient circumstances” of the time it was not so much the Federalist papers that captured most people’s imaginations as James Wilson’s speech of October 6, 1787, the most famous, to some the most notorious, federalist statement of the time. To this early, brief, and luminous pronouncement there were floods of refutations, confirmations, and miscellaneous responses.11 Comments on the Federalist papers, on the other hand, were few, usually scholarly and technical, and politically unremarkable. Rufus King thought Oliver Ellsworth’s “Landholder” essays more effective than the Federalist (they are indeed remarkably original pieces), and the federalist Judge A. C. Hanson, formerly Washington’s private secretary and soon to be the chancellor of the state of Maryland, while acknowledging that the Federalist papers display deep penetration and are ingenious and elaborate, found them sophistical in some places, painfully obvious in others, and throughout prolix and tiresome. He could not get through them, he said: they do not “force the attention, rouze the passions, or thrill the nerves.” His own short pamphlet, Remarks on the Proposed Plan, dedicated to Washington, might be inferior to the Federalist as an abstract treatise on government, he said, but “as an occasional pamphlet” he was confident it was “superiour” and “more serviceable.”12

  Hanson was at least right in thinking that for all their remarkable qualities the Federalist papers were not altogether original. Oliver Ellsworth wrote more clearly and fully on judicial review than did the Federalist authors, and both he and James Wilson recognized the central importance of that topic before they did. Twenty days before the appearance of Federalist X the New Jersey lawyer John Stevens, Jr., anticipated Madison’s central argument on republicanism, national size, and self-interest in the first of his “Americanus” essays, an analysis that was independently developed also by an anonymous Connecticut writer seventeen days later. Others went beyond Madison in locating the sources of the problem discussed in Federalist X in blockages of thought they discovered in the received tradition, inherited ideas that hitherto had been axiomatic but were now revealed to be anachronistic, distorted, or irrelevant.13

  For the federalists were obliged to work at that basic level if they were to succeed in their central task. They had no choice if they were to justify the creation of a new nation-state potentially as powerful as any other. The old beliefs of ’76 which had served to destroy an imperial power had somehow to be reconciled with nationalist needs. Yet it was obvious that the ideological origins of the American Revolution had been rooted not merely in a general fear of power but specifically in the belief that liberty could not survive where corruptible men wielded the apparatus of a powerful national state. Again and again both federalist and antifederalist commentators on the Constitution thought back to the 1760’s and 1770’s, the federalists to make progress toward justifying a national power system that would be safe for the people’s liberties, the antifederalists to show that such a project could never succeed, that it involved a profound self-contradiction, and that the Constitution, if adopted, would plunge the country into precisely the misery that the received wisdom had always predicted for any powerful centralized regime.

  2

  The antifederalists have been called “men of little faith” in that they lacked faith in the safe future that the federalists foresaw under the Constitution.14 But in the context of the great mass of ratification documents, the antifederalists emerge as the ones who kept the faith — the ancient faith so fundamental a part of the ideological origins of the Revolution, from which, they argued, the Constitution departed. The antifederalist Judge Thomas Tredwell of New York recalled the old days despairingly: in ’76, he declared, “the spirit of liberty ran high, and danger put a curb on ambition … Sir, in this Constitution we have not only neglected — we have done worse — we have openly violated, our faith — that is, our public faith.” Still emotionally and intellectually involved in the original struggle against an imperial government that had claimed total power over the American people, the antifederalists were haunted by the dangers that had then been foreseen. Now, faced with what seemed a similar threat, they summoned up the ghosts of those passionate years — and in the most specific, literal terms. The identity between antifederalist thought and that of the most fervent ideologists of ’76 is at times astonishing.15

  Mercy Otis Warren could never clear her mind of the dark vision of her ancient enemy, Thomas Hutchinson, who she never ceased believing had been a tool of absolutism and a willing servant of his despotic patron, the Earl of Hillsborough. Her widely circulated Observations on the Constitution (February 1788) is a boiling polemic, not simply against the federalists but also — and simultaneously — against the long-dead governor, that “great champion for arbitrary power [with his] machinations to subvert the liberties of this country” and his design to bring down on America “the infernal darkness of Asiatic slavery.” The same threat, she believed, had been renewed by the federalists, and her task, she felt, was to rekindle the dying embers of the patriotism and the love of freedom that had burned so brightly in ’76, and to demonstrate
the direct connection — the political descent — between the loyalists of ’76, with their program of arbitrary power, and James Wilson and his neo-Hutchinsonians, with their “many-headed monster,” the Constitution. For her, little but the personnel had changed over the years. The dangers were the same. In 1788 as in 1768 she saw the “deep-laid plots, the secret intrigues, [and] the bold effrontery of … interested and avaricious adventurers for place, who, intoxicated with the ideas of distinction and preferment, have prostrated every worthy principle beneath the shrine of ambition.” She, and other ardent antifederalists, could see a direct line from the loyalists and the wartime profiteers to the federalists; and she was convinced that once again America faced “dark, secret and profound intrigues of … the statesman long practiced in the purlieus of despotism.” Just as Hutchinson had urged his master Hillsborough to eliminate annual elections in Massachusetts in favor of triennial, so the Constitution would make Congressional elections biennial.16

  The fear of a conspiracy against the fragile structure of freedom, the same fear that had lain at the heart of the resistance movement before 1776, pervaded the thought of the antifederalists. No writer of the pre-Revolutionary period was more convinced that he was struggling with a secret plot against liberty than Luther Martin, whose rambling account of the Philadelphia convention, The Genuine Information, if extracted from its context, would seem an expression of extreme paranoia. Similarly, Samuel Bryan’s eighteen-part “Centinel” series in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer is a foaming diatribe against those “harpies of power,” the criminal conspirators against liberty who shield their secret intentions with “the virtues of a Washington,” blatantly lie to the public, and shackle the press to suppress opposition — in fact do anything, no matter how foul and vicious, to fob off on the people “the most odious system of tyranny that was ever projected [the Constitution], a many headed hydra of despotism, whose complicated and various evils would be infinitely more oppressive and afflictive than the scourge of any single tyrant.” Precisely who the instigators of this “deep laid scheme to enslave us” were, Bryan was not sure (another Philadelphian was quite certain that the Society of the Cincinnati was responsible and that Rufus King had inadvertently confessed as much in the Massachusetts convention). But it seemed obvious to Bryan that at the very least Franklin had hoodwinked the innocent Washington “by inducing him to acquiesce in a system of despotism and villainy, at which enlightened patriotism shudders.”17