The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  The pamphlets do reveal the influence of Enlightenment thought, and they do show the effective force of certain religious ideas, of the common law, and also of classical literature; but they reveal most significantly the close integration of these elements in a pattern of, to me at least, surprising design—surprising because of the prominence in it of still another tradition, interwoven with, yet still distinct from, these more familiar strands of thought. This distinctive influence had been transmitted most directly to the colonists by a group of early eighteenth-century radical publicists and opposition politicians in England who carried forward into the eighteenth century and applied to the politics of the age of Walpole the peculiar strain of anti-authoritarianism bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War. This tradition, as it developed in the British Isles, has in part been the subject of extensive research by Caroline Robbins, forming the substance of her Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman; in part too it has been the subject of recent research by students of other aspects of English history in this period: Archibald S. Foord, on the history of the opposition in eighteenth-century English politics; Alan D. McKillop, Bonamy Dobrée, and Louis I. Bredvold on the social and political background of early eighteenth-century literature; J. G. A. Pocock, J. W. Gough, Peter Laslett, and Corinne Weston on political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Ian Christie, George Rudé, Lucy Sutherland, and S. Maccoby on eighteenth-century radicalism. But little if any of this writing had hitherto been applied to the origins of the American Revolution. Convinced of the importance of this influence, I thought it would be useful to identify and analyze all the references found in the pamphlets, and on the basis of that analysis present in both the annotation to the texts and in essay form an interpretation of the sources and character of the American Revolutionary ideology. This essay on sources and patterns of ideas became the nucleus of the General Introduction to the edition of the pamphlets, and subsequently of this book, where it appears as Chapters II and III.

  It was in the context of the sources and patterns of ideas presented in these two chapters that I began to see a new meaning in phrases that I, like most historians, had readily dismissed as mere rhetoric and propaganda: “slavery,” “corruption,” “conspiracy.” These inflammatory words were used so forcefully by writers of so great a variety of social statuses, political positions, and religious persuasions; they fitted so logically into the pattern of radical and opposition thought; and they reflected so clearly the realities of life in an age in which monarchical autocracy flourished, in which the stability and freedom of England’s “mixed” constitution was a recent and remarkable achievement, and in which the fear of conspiracy against constituted authority was built into the very structure of politics, that I began to suspect that they meant something very real to both the writers and their readers: that there were real fears, real anxieties, a sense of real danger behind these phrases, and not merely the desire to influence by rhetoric and propaganda the inert minds of an otherwise passive populace. The more I read, the less useful, it seemed to me, was the whole idea of propaganda in its modern meaning when applied to the writings of the American Revolution—a view that I hope to develop at length on another occasion. In the end I was convinced that the fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world—a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption, and of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible part—lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement. This too seemed to me to be worth developing. It appeared as a chapter of the General Introduction to the edition of pamphlets, extended in a Note on Conspiracy; in expanded form it constitutes Chapter IV, and the Note appended to that chapter, in the present volume.

  Beyond all of this, however, I found in the pamphlets evidence of a transformation that overtook the inheritance of political and social thought as it had been received in the colonies by the early 1760’s. Indeliberately, half-knowingly, as responses not to desire but to the logic of the situation, the leaders of colonial thought in the years before Independence forced forward alterations in, or challenged, major concepts and assumptions of eighteenth-century political theory. They reached—then, before 1776, in the debate on the problem of imperial relations—new territories of thought upon which would be built the commanding structures of the first state constitutions and of the Federal Constitution. This too deserved to be explored, it seemed to me; the results appear in Chapter V. Finally there was evidence that this transformation of thought, which led to conclusions so remarkably congruent with the realities of American life, was powerfully contagious. It affected areas not directly involved in the Anglo-American controversy, areas as gross as the institution of chattel slavery and as subtle as the assumptions of human relations. This “spill-over” effect I have also tried to analyze, with results that appear in Chapter VI.

  At no point did I attempt to describe all shades of opinion on any of the problems discussed. I decided at the start to present what I took to be the dominant or leading ideas of those who made the Revolution. There were of course articulate and outspoken opponents of the Revolution, and at times I referred to their ideas; but the future lay not with them but with the leaders of the Revolutionary movement, and it is their thought at each stage of the developing rebellion that I attempted to present, using often the shorthand phrase “the colonists” to refer to them and their ideas.

  In this way, topic by topic as the story unfolded in the study of the pamphlets, the chapters that first appeared as the General Introduction to the first volume of Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1965) were conceived. Two considerations have led me to attempt to go beyond what I had written there and to develop the General Introduction into the present book. First, I found that there was some demand for a separate republication of the Introduction, the necessarily high price of the first volume of the Pamphlets having made its use particularly difficult for students. And second, my own subsequent work on early eighteenth-century politics and political thought led me to uncover a deeper and broader documentation of the story than that presented in the Introduction; and it led me, too, to see deeper implications in the story than those I had been able to see before. In this separate study of early eighteenth-century politics and political theory (published as The Origins of American Politics), I discovered that the configuration of ideas and attitudes I had described in the General Introduction as the Revolutionary ideology could be found intact as far back as the 1730’s; in partial form it could be found even farther back, at the turn of the seventeenth century. The transmission from England to America of the literature of political opposition that furnished the substance of the ideology of the Revolution had been so swift in the early years of the eighteenth century as to seem almost instantaneous; and, for reasons that reach into the heart of early American politics, these ideas acquired in the colonies an importance, a relevance in politics, they did not then have—and never would have—in England itself. There was no sharp break between a placid pre-Revolutionary era and the turmoil of the 1760’s and 1770’s. The argument, the claims and counter-claims, the fears and apprehensions that fill the pamphlets, letters, newspapers, and state papers of the Revolutionary years had in fact been heard throughout the century. The problem no longer appeared to me to be simply why there was a Revolution but how such an explosive amalgam of politics and ideology first came to be compounded, why it remained so potent through years of surface tranquillity, and why, finally, it was detonated when it was.

  These new materials and this new dimension I have tried to work into the revision and expansion of the original Introduction; and I have tried to do this without destroying the structure of the original chapters. One result has been a considerable enlargement of the annotation. For while the text proper is expanded, especially in Chapters II–IV, and the phraseology elaborated in many places to convey the greater density of material and depth of argument, much of the new material will
be found in the annotation. It is there, particularly, that I have sought to trace back into the early eighteenth century—and back into the European sources, wherever possible—the specific attitudes, conceptions, formulations, even in certain cases particular phrases, which together form the ideology of the American Revolution.

  My debts to the people who assisted in one way or another in the preparation of the initial publication of this book I have gratefully acknowledged in the Foreword to volume I of the Pamphlets. Many of them have continued to help in the preparation of this enlarged version. I would like particularly to thank Jane N. Garrett, who assisted me in the research on the early eighteenth-century sources of the Revolutionary ideology, and Carol S. Thorne, who tracked elusive books through the most arcane windings of the Harvard library system, and typed the complicated manuscript accurately and with unfailing good cheer.

  B. B.

  1967

  1. Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth- Century America,” American Historical Review, 67 (1961–62), 339–351.

  CONTENTS

     I THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION

    II SOURCES AND TRADITIONS

   III POWER AND LIBERTY: A THEORY OF POLITICS

  IV THE LOGIC OF REBELLION

  A Note on Conspiracy

   V TRANSFORMATION

  1. Representation and Consent

  2. Constitutions and Rights

  3. Sovereignty

  VI THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY

  1. Slavery

  2. Establishment of Religion

  3. The Democracy Unleashed

  4. “Whether Some Degree of Respect Be Not Always Due from Inferiors to Superiors”

  POSTSCRIPT. FULFILLMENT: A COMMENTARY ON THE CONSTITUTION

  INDEX

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Adams, Diary and Autobiography

  Lyman H. Butterfield, et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. 4 vols. Cambridge, 1961.

  Adams, Works

  Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams. 10 vols. Boston, 1850–1856.

  Bailyn, Pamphlets

  Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution. Cambridge, 1965, in progress.

  CC

  Commentaries on the Constitution: vols. XIII–XVI of Doc. Hist.

  Doc. Hist.

  Merrill Jensen, John P. Kaminski, and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Madison, 1976, in progress.

  Elliot, Debates

  Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution … 2d ed., 4 vols. Washington, D.C., 1836.

  Evans

  Charles Evans, comp., American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America [1639–1800]. 14 vols. Chicago and Worcester, 1903–1959. (Volumes XIII and XIV were compiled by Clifford K. Shipton.)

  Gipson, British Empire

  Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution. 15 vols. Caldwell, Idaho, and New York, 1936–1970.

  JHL

  The John Harvard Library

  MHS Colls.

  Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society

  MHS Procs.

  Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society

  Pa. Mag.

  Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

  W.M.Q.

  William and Mary Quarterly

  Chapter I

  THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION

  What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of thirteen legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers in all the colonies, ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of Parliament over the colonies.

  — John Adams to Jefferson, 1815

  WHATEVER deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them. They wrote easily and amply, and turned out in the space of scarcely a decade and a half and from a small number of presses a rich literature of theory, argument, opinion, and polemic. Every medium of written expression was put to use. The newspapers, of which by 1775 there were thirty-eight in the mainland colonies, were crowded with columns of arguments and counter-arguments appearing as letters, official documents, extracts of speeches, and sermons. Broadsides — single sheets on which were often printed not only large-letter notices but, in three or four columns of minuscule type, essays of several thousand words — appeared everywhere; they could be found posted or passing from hand to hand in the towns of every colony. Almanacs, workaday publications universally available in the colonies, carried, in odd corners and occasional columns, a considerable freight of political comment.1 Above all, there were pamphlets: booklets consisting of a few printer’s sheets, folded in various ways so as to make various sizes and numbers of pages, and sold — the pages stitched together loosely, unbound and uncovered — usually for a shilling or two.2

  It was in this form — as pamphlets — that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared. For the Revolutionary generation, as for its predecessors back to the early sixteenth century, the pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.

  The pamphlet [George Orwell, a modern pamphleteer, has written] is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “highbrow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.3

  The pamphlet’s greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accommodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well. Some pamphlets of the Revolutionary period contain sixty or even eighty pages, on which are printed technical, magisterial treatises. Between the extremes of the squib and the book-length treatise, however, there lay the most commonly used, the ideally convenient, length: from 5,000 to 25,000 words, printed on anywhere from ten to fifty pages, quarto or octavo in size.

  The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument — to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accommodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literary forms; it gave range for the publication of fully wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.”4 And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at imm
ediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consequently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care.

  Highly flexible, easy to manufacture, and cheap, pamphlets were printed in the American colonies wherever there were printing presses, intellectual ambitions, and political concerns. But in their origins most of them may be grouped within three categories. The largest number were direct responses to the great events of the time. The Stamp Act touched off a heavy flurry of pamphleteering in which basic American positions in constitutional theory were staked out; its repeal was celebrated by the publication of at least eleven thanksgiving sermons, all of them crowded with political theory; the Townshend Duties led to another intense burst of pamphleteering, as did the Boston Massacre and the precipitating events of the insurrection itself — the Tea Party, the Coercive Acts, and the meeting of the first Continental Congress.5

  But if the writing of the pamphlets had been only a response to these overt public events, their numbers would have been far smaller than in fact they were. They resulted also, and to a considerable extent, from what might be called chain-reacting personal polemics: strings of individual exchanges — arguments, replies, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals — in which may be found heated personifications of the larger conflict. A bold statement on a sensitive issue was often sufficient to start such a series, which characteristically proceeded with increasing shrillness until it ended in bitter personal vituperation. Thus East Apthorp’s tract of 1763 on the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, inflaming as it did New Englanders’ fears of an American bishopric, was answered at once by Jonathan Mayhew in a 176-page blast, and then, in the course of the next two years, by no less than nine other pamphleteers writing in a melee of thrusts and counterthrusts. Similarly, a succession of seven or eight searing pamphlets followed Richard Bland’s attack on the Reverend John Camm in the Two-Penny Act controversy in Virginia. Any number of people could join in such proliferating polemics, and rebuttals could come from all sides. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was answered not merely by two exhaustive refutations by Tories but also by at least four pamphlets written by patriots who shared his desire for independence but not his constitutional and religious views or his assumptions about human nature.6