By the latter half of the 1700s Great Britain owned thirteen colonies in North America, in addition to Canada, which it had recently won from France. The colonies stretched all the way from Maine’s frigid lobster shoals to Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. Great Britain’s king and Parliament (the legislature) tried to rule them from three thousand miles away.
Problems rose when Britain found itself in debt. The government decided, sensibly, that its American colonists should pay their share of taxes. It also demanded that Americans should trade only with Britain, thus enriching their mother country and not its rivals, France, the Netherlands, or Spain. And it ordered that the colonists not provoke the Indians by moving into Indian lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
Americans rejoined that they could handle their affairs quite well alone. Why, they asked, did Parliament, in which Americans weren’t represented, have the right to gather taxes from them and instruct them what to do? To this the British answered that Parliament represented America just as much as it did all of Britain. True, they said, Americans sent no representatives to Parliament, but neither did the thriving English town of Liverpool. Both places, so they said, had “virtual representation” in Parliament. Members of Parliament spoke not only for the places that elected (or appointed) them but also for the whole.
Americans protested and refused to pay the taxes. In the town of Boston, in the colony of Massachusetts, men opposed to Britain’s tax on tea disguised themselves as Indians, boarded British vessels after dark, and dumped 342 chests of tea leaves into the water. Britain hesitated to use force against the colonies, but King George III declared, “We must either master them, or totally leave them to themselves.” In 1775 British soldiers clashed with American volunteers near Boston. Thus began a minor war that had immense results.
Delegates from the thirteen American colonies gathered in the spring of 1776 at Philadelphia, determined not to yield to Britain. Early in July the delegates declared to all the world that the colonies were no longer under British rule; they now were independent.
They explained the reason in a document they called “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” To a world that only knew hard-fisted kings and haughty gentry, the declaration must have been astounding. It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To secure these rights, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And “men” (not including slaves) have a right of revolution. “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”
The principal writer of the declaration was Thomas Jefferson, a young Virginia planter. Jefferson had it all: charm, friends, a hilltop mansion he had designed, research gardens, books, facility in seven languages, and a gift for writing prose that sings. He also had a moral conflict: he loved democracy but owned 150 slaves. (As DNA tests have shown, Jefferson fathered at least one child with a slave. This woman was herself the daughter of a slave-owner, Jefferson’s father-in-law.) Jefferson knew very well that owning slaves contradicted his own words about the rights of men. He hated slavery and said so, but he didn’t hate it enough to free his slaves.
As commander in chief the rebels chose the capable George Washington, who, like Jefferson, was a wealthy Virginia planter and slaveholder. Years before, Washington had fought beside the British against the French and Indians on the colonies’ west frontier. When bullets whistled around him he found “something charming in the sound.”
As the war began, it was hard to see how either side could win. There was too much America for Britain to suppress, and too few Americans to keep them from suppressing it. For several years the little war was indecisive. The turning point arrived when France, which earlier had lost a war with Britain, joined the Americans. Men and ships from France made the difference. The fighting stopped in 1781 after Frenchmen and Americans cornered a British army in Virginia and forced it to surrender. According to a legend, as the British troops gave up their arms their bandsmen played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.”
When the war had started, the thirteen colonies joined to form a government of thirteen states. But the feeble “Continental Congress,” as the government was called, had shown that it could barely carry on a war or regulate the trade between the thirteen states. When the war was over, the states decided they must write a better “constitution,” or framework of a government.
To reach agreement wouldn’t be a snap. In the recent war the thirteen delegations in the Congress hadn’t always pulled together. They were different kinds of people. Other regions saw New Englanders as “dam’d Yankees” who wore black stockings and had rasping, whining voices. Washington once said they were “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people.” For their part, many Yankees saw the southerners as slave-abusing, bourbon-sipping dandies.
With a government to build, delegates from all the states but one (Rhode Island) gathered once again in Philadelphia during the spring and summer of 1787. Laborers strewed gravel on the street outside their meeting room so that the delegates might concentrate undisturbed by clattering hooves and rattling wagons. Washington, the hero of the just-concluded war, presided, sitting on a high-backed chair. The flies were bad and the weather hot.
It took the delegates four months of wrangling to produce a constitution. Although it filled only four parchment pages, each was packed with crisply worded fundamental laws. The simple fact that it was written, which today seems natural, was in fact remarkable. Other governments had no such thing; their kings and gentry followed ancient, unrecorded rules or none at all. In the coming decades, democratic rebels elsewhere in the world would often follow the American example, writing constitutions that embodied social views.
The United States Constitution starts out boldly with the then-surprising words “We the People.” Right from the beginning, the shapers of the government made clear that it rested on consent by all. That they stated this was no surprise. Hadn’t the Declaration of Independence affirmed a decade earlier that “all men are created equal”? If all were equal, all must share in governing.
In fact, however, the delegates were far from all-out democrats. These “Founding Fathers” didn’t trust their children, or at least not all of them, when it came to choosing men to govern. They stipulated that the president was not to be elected directly by all the “People” but rather by “Electors” chosen by the states. They hoped that these electors would be prudent men of means — “the better sort,” not sodden sailors or benighted bumpkins.
Senators as well would not be chosen directly by the ordinary voters (whom the delegates considered “less fit judges”). State legislatures would elect them. (But the framers might have made the Senate much less democratic. One delegate, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, wanted senators to be chosen only from men of property, and to serve for life.) The delegates decided that only “Representatives,” the other “house” of Congress, would be chosen by the ordinary voters — men only, of course.
The delegates gave little thought to letting slaves be citizens, which would have meant the end of slavery. At this time one in five Americans were slaves. This fact embarrassed many delegates, whether from the North or South. No one had to tell them that the Declaration of Independence stated that “all men are created equal.”
But the northern delegates knew better than to urge that slaves be citizens. The southerners would never have agreed, or if they had the people of their states would later have refused to vote in favor of the constitution. So they reached a compromise: not to end slavery but to forbid importing slaves after 1808. Some may have dreamed that after that date slavery would fade away.
At last their work was done. As they finished old Ben Franklin gazed acr
oss the room at the high-backed chair from which Washington had presided. The sun was painted on the chair back. Franklin remarked that he had “often and often in the course of the session” looked at that sun “without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” When he went outside, a woman asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a Republic or a Monarch?” “A Republic, madam,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” After much debating up and down the coast, the states approved the Constitution, and the ship of state was launched.
More democracy was on the way. The first Congress and the states amended the Constitution by adding to it guarantees of certain rights “of the people.” These included freedom of speech and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Later on the country dropped those limits that the framers had set on elections of presidents and senators. By doing so, it gave full citizenship to all the “People.”
All the People that is, but Indians, slaves, and women. Those were rather big exceptions. In the next half century, slavery, far from withering, would thrive and spread. In the early 1860s slavery would cause the North and the South to fight a bloody Civil War. The war resulted in the end of slavery, but its effects would linger. Only a century later, after bitter struggle, did all blacks truly get the right to vote.
Indians would fare no better. White Americans would push them west and pen them in on barren lands the whites disdained. Many Indians would die of drink, disease, and despair. Only a century and a half after the signing of the Constitution would Congress grant them citizenship. Only later still would it repeal the laws that made it legal to hold Indians as virtual prisoners on “reservations.”
At about the same time various states would grant women the right to vote. In 1920 Americans amended the Constitution to enfranchise women throughout the country.
WHEN THE UNITED STATES carried out its revolution in the 1770s and ’80s, it was just a forest outpost on the western edge of European civilization. Compare America with France, in 1789, on the eve of France’s revolution. France was Europe’s strongest, richest power and its cultural leader. It was in the language of the French that Austrian and Russian envoys threatened one another with a war. Everyone who counted learned from France what clothes to wear, what food to eat, what books to read, what thoughts to think. If the king of France began to build a palace, other rulers summoned architects. If the king of France had a pretty, witty mistress, other rulers…did their best. (The mistresses of Britain’s George I were called the Maypole and the Elephant.)
On the eve of France’s revolution, in 1789, the king of France was Louis XVI. He had inherited the throne fifteen years earlier, at the age of nineteen, when his grandfather died of smallpox. (“What a burden!” Louis exclaimed when he heard the news. “At my age! And I have been taught nothing!”) Louis was a shy and decent man who relished eating, hunting, and tinkering with locks. He and his queen, Marie Antoinette, and their little son lived twenty miles from Paris at Versailles. Their ostentatious palace, more than a third of a mile long, held not only the seat of government but apartments for a thousand courtiers and four thousand servants.
France was deep in debt. The government was spending half its revenues just to pay the interest on the money it already owed. Louis’s ministers tried to increase revenues by taxing nobles, clergymen, and government jobholders, all of whom were exempt from taxes. But the noble law courts blocked this sensible reform. So Louis reluctantly agreed to summon the Estates General in the spring of 1789. The Estates were an ancient, almost forgotten body of nobles, churchmen (bishops and priests), and well-off commoners, called the “people.” Kings had sometimes summoned them to give consent to taxes, but hardly often; the Estates had last assembled 175 years before.
After the Estates had gathered at Versailles, the third estate, the “people,” raised a parliamentary issue. The ancient custom was that each estate (or “order”) voted as a block. The practical effect of this was that the nobles and the clergy (bishops and priests) could out-vote the “people.” That may have been acceptable in 1614, but by 1789 France was a modernizing country with a growing middle class of lawyers, businessmen, and lesser landlords. Their deputies would not agree to have their voices count only a third.
Events moved fast. Boldly, the third estate renamed themselves the “National Assembly” and invited the nobles and the clergy to join their sessions. When Louis therefore barred the third estate, now the National Assembly, from their usual meeting place, they gathered in an indoor tennis court. There they took an oath never to disband until they had given France a constitution. The king considered using force against them, but reliable troops were far away, and he gave in. He told the noblemen and clergy to join the National Assembly and vote “by head,” rather than by “order.”
A revolution had begun. It would move steadily to the left, against the nobles and the clergy and toward democracy, but also toward violence. One force that drove it on was hunger. Hail and drought had cut the harvests during 1788, and by the spring of ’89 the price of grain was high and bread was hard to find. The problem was momentous, since lower-income Frenchmen nearly lived on bread. Hungry workers rioted, and housewives laid siege to bakers. In the countryside, peasants poached the deer and rabbits in their landlords’ woods and raided convoys hauling wheat on country roads.
In July, several hundred Paris workmen and shopkeepers stormed a fortress-prison known as the Bastille. They wanted weapons to defend the city from King Louis’s troops, who were known to be gathering in the Paris area. They killed the fort’s commander and some soldiers, and freed the prisoners — all seven of them. In response, Louis pulled his other troops out of the city. The fall of the Bastille excited millions of the French; to them it proved the power of a determined people.
Meanwhile, rumors spread that wealthy lords were sending squads of thugs to massacre the peasants. This mass delusion, this “Great Fear” as it was called, spread from village to village. In parts of France the peasants grabbed their hoes and pitchforks, anything that they could use as weapons. They broke into the landlords’ country homes and barns, looking for the grain they thought the rich were hoarding, and also for the records of the dues and rents that they had had to pay their lords for centuries. They burned some barns and lynched a few aristocrats. Many others fled to cities and later left the country.
The National Assembly knew it must grant something to the peasants, preferably at the expense of the detested noblemen and higher clergy. At a dramatic evening meeting during August the nobles — the liberal nobles who were present — agreed to surrender their right to the dues that some peasants had to pay their lords. The Assembly also agreed that everyone, including nobles and privileged townspeople, would pay taxes, and no one would be made to pay the Church a tax on income.
The National Assembly then approved a Declaration of the Rights of Man. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” it said. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” Those words are much like those of the American Declaration of Independence, which Americans had written only thirteen years before. Do they show that the American Revolution influenced France’s revolutionaries? They do. However, it is also true that for some time now ideas of equal rights had been in the air in western Europe. People known as “democrats” had already been skirmishing with aristocrats.
In autumn, bread was still expensive, though the harvest had been good. The lively new Paris newspapers spread the story that the queen, when someone told her that the people had no bread, had joked, “Let them eat cake!” The story wasn’t true, but it angered many. On a rainy October day hundreds of women — housewives, shop assistants, even “ladies with hats” — marched all the way from Paris to Versailles demanding bread. They stormed inside the palace and they almost caught and lynched the queen. The next day they marc
hed back to Paris, proudly bringing the royal family with them, virtually as prisoners. They were sure these three would somehow put more bread on kitchen tables, and they chanted, “We’re bringing the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s lad to Paris!”
The fall of the Bastille and Louis’s humiliation ended royal rule, although the king did not step down. After Louis had decamped from royal Versailles to rebel Paris, the National Assembly did the same. Now the deputies could safely go ahead and carry out reforms and write a constitution.
Overnight, they broke apart an ancient social system, as an able traffic cop dissolves a gridlock. Among many other acts, they sold the lands of nobles who had fled, proclaiming that “the properties of patriots are sacred, but the goods of conspirators are there for the unfortunate.” They confiscated the land of the Catholic Church. They ended slavery in France’s New World colonies. And what was most important, they wrote a constitution, as Americans had done. It gave the vote, the key to democracy, to the better-off taxpayers. Later, almost every Frenchman got the right to vote, but the revolutionaries made sure that only their supporters exercised the right.
The Human Story Page 24