Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  The decision of Lord North's government to wage war on the Americans as if they were a foreign enemy, deploying against them the full panoply of British naval and military power, forced the Congress inexorably towards a radical reassessment of the relationship between the colonies and the king. Their dispute had traditionally been a dispute with a British parliament that made unacceptable claims to intervene in their affairs. Their loyalty, however, was not to a corrupt and self-aggrandizing parliament but to the monarch, whom they regarded as the sole source of legitimate authority. `He it is', wrote Alexander Hamilton, `that has defended us from our enemies, and to him alone we are obliged to render allegiance and submission."' But disillusionment was spreading, and the convenient image of a benevolently disposed monarch could not indefinitely withstand the uncomfortable realities of 1774-5. George III, by all accounts, was adamant for war. He showed no inclination to accept petitions from his American subjects, and in the aftermath of the battle at Bunker Hill was reported to be busily negotiating with his European fellow monarchs for the recruitment of mercenaries to fight in America.85 By proclaiming in August 1775 that the Americans were rebels, and ordering war against them, he had effectively destroyed the compact that bound them to their king.

  Yet residual loyalty remained strong, just as, some forty years later, it would remain strong in Spanish America when the creoles were similarly faced by evidence of the complicity of Ferdinand VII in ordering their oppression.86 Washington acknowledged this continuing loyalty as late as April 1776: `My countrymen I know, from their form of government, and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independence. 117 The radicals had their sights fixed - some of them since 1774 or even earlier" - on independence as the only way out of the impasse. There were many, however, like John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who still hankered after a return to an imagined golden age before 1763. The first Continental Congress expressed this hope in its `Address to the Peoples of Great Britain': `Place us in the same condition that we were at the close of the last war, and our former harmony will be restored.'89 But to increasing numbers the escalation of conflict in the spring of 1775 was now making independence look like the only alternative to surrender. `The middle way', wrote John Adams, `is no way at all. If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way.'90

  Congress in effect was already operating as a sovereign authority, but as Washington wrote in May 1776: `To form a new Government, requires infinite care and unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad ...'91 This foundation was to be laid in the following weeks, although it had first to be preceded by the work of demolition. Tom Paine's Common Sense, anonymously published as the work of `an Englishman' in January 1776, achieved the required explosive result. In its first three months, according to Paine, it sold 120,000 copies.92

  The clarity of Paine's argument and the forcefulness of his rhetoric swept everything before them. Drawing equally on John Locke's minimalist ideas about the purpose of government - to provide `freedom and security' in Paine's words, including security not only for property but also for the free practice of religion93 - and on the radical tradition of the Commonwealthmen, he began with a blistering attack on monarchy and hereditary succession, and was dismissive of `the so much boasted constitution of England'.94 In the opinion of John Adams, the author had `a better hand at pulling down than building'.95 Yet after tearing down the edifice with a ferocious enthusiasm well calculated to play on popular emotions and incite to violent action, Paine went on to mount a powerful case for independence and union that was equally well calculated to appeal to the large body of moderate opinion which still hesitated to take the plunge. His argument was all the more effective for being set in a world-historical context:

  The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent - of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. 16

  The logic of these stirring words pointed inexorably to the establishment of an independent republic - `... the most powerful of all arguments, is, that nothing but independence, i.e. a continental form of government, can keep the peace of the continent and preserve it inviolate from civil wars.'97 To establish a republic on a `continental' scale, however - a republic in which `the law is king'98 - would mean a massive leap into the unknown.99 Those European republics still surviving in a monarchical age - Venice, the Swiss Confederation, the Dutch Republic and a clutch of city states - were relatively small polities. They were also thought to be constitutionally prone to descending into venal oligarchy or succumbing to the power of the mob. In spite of the successes of the Dutch Republic, the precedents hardly appeared encouraging. loo Paine, however, was a man who had no use for precedents. At a time when the British constitution, which had once dazzled by its glory, was losing its halo among growing numbers of colonists,10' Paine described it as fatally vitiated by the corrupting presence of monarchy and hereditary rule. His sights were set on the future, not on the past. `We have it in our power to begin the world over again."02

  A vision cast in terms of the future could be expected to resonate powerfully in colonial American society. For the best part of two centuries preachers had encouraged New Englanders to see their country as occupying a special place in God's providential design.103 The evangelical preachers of the Great Awakening gave millenarian wings to this message as they carried it through the colonies. Was not the millennium likely to begin in America, as Jonathan Edwards pro- claimed?'04 Millennial prophecy, with its vision of a state of bliss to come, rode well in consort with a republican ideology designed to begin the world again. Underlying both images was the perception of the New World of America as a genuinely new world. The ill-informed criticisms of European commentators were an inducement to Americans to open their eyes to see and appreciate the unique nature of their land. That uniqueness would in due course find expression in a novel and constitutionally unique form of political community.

  It was the dangerous, and potentially disastrous, developments of the spring and summer of 1776 that produced the convergence of revolutionary energy and revolutionary ideas needed to break the ties of empire and bring a self-governing American republic into being. The military campaign launched by Congress in 1775 to bring Canada into the union was collapsing, leaving the northern frontiers of New York and New England exposed to British and Indian attack; British land and naval forces were massing against New York; and George III, insisting on the reassertion of royal authority before there could be any talk of peace, was reported to have contracted for Hessian mercenaries to reinforce his army in America.105

  Faced with the collapse of civil authority, individual colonies, led by New Hampshire and North Carolina, were already starting to write their constitutions, and on 15 May 1776 Congress recommended `the respective Assemblies and Conventions of the United Colonies ... to adopt such a government as shall ... best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general'.106 On the same day, the Virginia Convention instructed its delegates in Philadelphia to propose that Congress `declare the United Colonies free and independent States'.107 With varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance, and driven forward by a combination of popular pressure, political manipulation and the sheer momentum of events, one after another of the United Colonies fell into line.

  The conservative-dominated Assembly of Pennsylvania, whose foot-dragging over the move to independence had so enraged John Adams and his fellow radicals in the Congress, was an early casualty. Philadelphia, with its vibrant artisan culture, was already a strongly politicized city when Thomas Paine arrived there from England in the a
utumn of 1774 (fig. 4). Ten years earlier Franklin had mobilized the city's mechanics, craftsmen and shopkeepers in his campaign to replace proprietary with royal government, and the non-importation movement in the early 1770s stirred a fresh round of agitation among artisans who resented the dominance of the merchant oligarchs and wanted protection against competition from British manufactures. These were people who had a strong sense of the importance of self-improvement and self-help, and Paine's Common Sense, with its plain man's arguments for independence presented in a plain man's prose, had an enormous impact on them as they snapped up their freshly printed copies and rehearsed its arguments in taverns and coffee-houses. Service in the militia companies and participation in the various civic committees that sprang up in 1775-6 were giving them a growing sense of empowerment. When a group of radicals, including Paine, seized the initiative and launched their challenge to the dominance of the Pennsylvania Assembly and the merchant elite, the artisans and lower orders made their power felt at public meetings and on Philadelphia's streets. 108

  With a well-spring of popular support in Philadelphia, and in a Pennsylvania west country which had long resented its political marginalization, the radicals exploited the congressional resolution of 15 May to press forward with their plans for a Convention. This met on 18 June. By the time the Pennsylvania Assembly met again in mid-August after an adjournment, a new constitution had been drawn up by the Convention, which had effectively seized control of government. The most radical and democratic of all the new American constitutions, it followed Paine in rejecting the British principle of balanced government, created a unicameral legislature, and gave the suffrage to all tax-paying freemen over the age of 21.109 In New York, by contrast, the congressional resolution, combined with the landing of British troops at Staten Island, gave conservatives the opportunity to outmanoeuvre the radicals to their left and the Tory loyalists to their right, and to seize the initiative in moving towards independence on their own terms.110

  The Convention called by Virginia, the fourth colony to avail itself of the congressional authorization to devise a new form of government, adopted its new constitution on 29 June 1776, after approving earlier in the month a Declaration of Rights. This, like the Bill of Rights adopted by the first Continental Congress in 1774, was inspired by the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which had formally ended the reign of James II and inaugurated that of William and Mary.111 In searching for a legitimate device for terminating one form of government and installing another, colonial elites looked instinctively to the Whig constitutional tradition in which they had been raised.

  As colony after colony in the spring and summer of 1776 moved to declare its independence and embark on the task of establishing a new form of government, an irresistible momentum built up for a formal Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress. Individual colonies had taken the law into their own hands, but the United Colonies lacked any internationally acceptable legal standing, and they desperately needed the military assistance that only France could supply to keep their rebellion going. The stark truth was spelled out on 2 June by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: `It is not choice then but necessity that calls for independence as the only means by which foreign alliances can be obtained."" Five days later, on the instructions of the Virginia Convention, he put forward a resolution in the Congress, seconded by John Adams, that `these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.'

  Following the passage of the resolution the Congress set up a drafting committee to prepare a Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson, the newly arrived Virginia delegate, as one of its five members. He had recently prepared a draft constitution for Virginia, and it was to him, with his `peculiar felicity of expression', as John Adams put it, that the final wording of the proposed Declaration was entrusted, although the political advantage of involving a southerner in an enterprise which might otherwise have smacked too much of New England radicalism is likely to have weighed at least as heavily as considerations of literary skill.113

  After much editing by the Committee of Five, Jefferson's text, which did indeed display his `peculiar felicity of expression', was delivered to Congress on 28 June. On 2 July, after unanimously affirming that `these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States', Congress turned itself into a Committee of the Whole, for further discussion and amendment of the text - a process that caused its author growing distress. The most substantive change, introduced on the urging of South Carolina and Georgia, was the removal of a lengthy paragraph on the `execrable commerce' in slaves. 114 The wording of the text was finally accepted by Congress on 4 July, a date that would prevail over 2 July as the official anniversary of independence."' Four days later in Philadelphia the United Colonies ceremonially announced to the world that henceforth they were to be regarded as free and United States. Copies of the Declaration were circulated and reprinted, and the symbols of royalty were torn down across the colonies.

  The document declaring the colonies to be independent of British rule represented an eloquent amalgam of the traditions, assumptions and ideas that had animated the resistance to imperial measures over the preceding two decades.116 In providing a long list of `injuries and usurpations' allegedly committed by the king, the Declaration, like the earlier Declaration prepared by Jefferson for the Virginia Convention, drew on the precedents provided by the English Declaration of Rights of 1689. Now it was George III instead of James II who was bent on ,the establishment of an absolute tyranny', and who had ignored all petitions for redress. The consequence in this instance, however, was the termination of allegiance, not simply, as in 1688-9, to the monarch of the moment, but to the British crown itself. `All political connection' was to be dissolved between the United Colonies - now to become the `United States of America' - and the `State of Great Britain'. In thus dissolving the connection between two polities the Declaration resembled less the Bill of Rights of 1689 than the Act of Abjuration of 1584 by which the States General of the Netherlands renounced their allegiance to Philip II of Spain. 117

  The American colonists, like the Dutch and the English before them, were resorting in their Declaration of Independence to that standard recourse for rebels in the western world, the idea of a contract between a ruler and his subjects. Hispanic Americans, when opposing some measure of which they disapproved, traditionally resorted to the same device. While contractualism itself was common to the peoples of both colonial societies, and was firmly rooted in their shared natural law tradition, distinctive national histories and religious traditions inevitably shaped the context in which it was deployed. The Comuneros of New Granada in 1781 were the spiritual heirs of the Comuneros of Castile in 1521, who themselves looked back to the Castilian constitutionalist tradition embodied in the medieval law code of the Siete Partidas. In 1776, Jefferson and the representatives assembled in the Congress consciously took their place in a distinguished historical line of resistance to tyrants that was embodied in Magna Carta, and then ran forward through the Protestant Reformation and the revolt of the Netherlands to seventeenth-century Britain, and eventually to themselves. Buttressed by the English legal tradition with its heroic record of defending English liberties, resistance doctrines drew their theoretical support from the writings of a succession of political philosophers, among them Locke and the radical Whig upholders of the Old Cause.

  In the Declaration of Independence, however, the historical and legal case for a separation between the colonies and the British state was subsumed, as it was in Paine's Common Sense, within a larger moral case of universal import: when a government behaves tyrannically, the people have a duty to sever their connection with it.11' Lurking in the background of this argument was the classical republican tradition, as transmitted through the Commonwealthmen, with its emphasis on morality in the shape of civic virtue, as the sole defence against the loss of liberty. More immediately important, however, was the determination of Jefferson and
his colleagues to relate the cause of independence to the `self-evident truths' revealed by the Enlightenment.

  Although Jefferson, in enunciating the self-evidence of these truths, may have been inspired by the writings of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers,119 they were deeply grounded in Lockean morality. While there was a tension between the organic view of society inherent in classical republicanism, and the individualism inherent in Locke's political philosophy, the unanimity with which the Declaration of Independence was received and approved suggests that the two forms of discourse remained at this stage mutually compatible. The strain of radical individualism in Locke's thinking had yet to be asserted at the expense of its other components, and the men of 1776 drew on a common culture that found space for classical republicanism while being imbued with Lockean principles. 120

  At the heart of those principles was the belief in a benevolent Deity who created men and women as rational beings, capable of coming together to form civil societies based on consent. The eighteenth-century colonists had become Lockeans almost without realizing it, accepting in principle the notion of a fundamental equality, at least for themselves, although not for Indians and Africans; tolerating a wide variety of opinions as necessary to the successful functioning of a society that must be based on mutual trust; and applying themselves to industrious pursuits with the purpose and expectation of improving their own condition and that of the society in which they lived.

  In doing so, they looked to government to protect what the Declaration called `certain unalienable rights', among them `life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. While the more normal formulation was `life, liberty, and property', Locke himself, in book 2 of the Essay Concerning Understanding, had written several times of `the pursuit of happiness'. For Locke, happiness was what God desired for all His creation, and was the earthly foretaste of His goodness. The Swiss jurist and philosopher Burlamaqui and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, with whose writings Jefferson was well acquainted, had similarly emphasized the right of human beings to be happy.'21 So fashionable, indeed, had the notion become that eighteenth-century rulers conventionally pronounced the promotion of happiness to be one of their aims. The governor of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher, picking up on the language of the age, spoke in an address to the General Assembly in 1731 of laying the foundation for laws that `would greatly promote the Happiness of this People'.'22 As used in the Declaration of Independence, however, the notion of happiness acquired its full resonance, as the inalienable right of God's creatures to enjoy to the maximum their liberty and the fruits of their labours, unmolested by government as they went about their business and their pleasures.