The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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What brought these disparate strands of thought together, what dominated the colonists’ miscellaneous learning and shaped it into a coherent whole, was the influence of still another group of writers, a group whose thought overlapped with that of those already mentioned but which was yet distinct in its essential characteristics and unique in its determinative power. The ultimate origins of this distinctive ideological strain lay in the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and of the Commonwealth period; but its permanent form had been acquired at the turn of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, in the writings of a group of prolific opposition theorists, “country” politicians and publicists.
Among the seventeenth-century progenitors of this line of eighteenth-century radical writers and opposition politicians united in criticism of “court” and ministerial power, Milton was an important figure — not Milton the poet so much as Milton the radical tractarian, author of Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (both published in 1649). The American Revolutionary writers referred with similar respect if with less understanding to the more systematic writing of Harrington and to that of the like-minded Henry Neville; above all, they referred to the doctrines of Algernon Sidney, that “martyr to civil liberty” whose Discourses Concerning Government (1698) became, in Caroline Robbins’ phrase, a “textbook of revolution” in America.16
The colonists identified themselves with these seventeenth-century heroes of liberty: but they felt closer to the early eighteenth-century writers who modified and enlarged this earlier body of ideas, fused it into a whole with other, contemporary strains of thought, and, above all, applied it to the problems of eighteenth-century English politics. These early eighteenth-century writers — coffeehouse radicals and opposition politicians, spokesmen for the anti-Court independents within Parliament and the disaffected without, draftsmen of a “country” vision of English politics that would persist throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth — faded subsequently into obscurity and are little known today. But more than any other single group of writers they shaped the mind of the American Revolutionary generation.
To the colonists the most important of these publicists and intellectual middlemen were those spokesmen for extreme libertarianism, John Trenchard (1662–1723) and Thomas Gordon (d. 1750). The former, a west-country squire of ample means and radical ideas, was a 57-year-old veteran of the pamphlet wars that surrounded the Glorious Revolution when in 1719 he met Gordon, “a clever young Scot … fresh from Aberdeen University, [who had come] to London to make his fortune, equipped with little but a sharp tongue and a ready wit.” They joined forces to produce, first, the weekly Independent Whig to attack High Church pretensions and, more generally, the establishment of religion, fifty-three papers of which were published in book form in 1721; and Cato’s Letters, a searing indictment of eighteenth-century English politics and society written in response to the South Sea Bubble crisis, which appeared first serially in The London Journal and then, beginning in 1720, in book form.17 Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages the major themes of the “left” opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III,18 left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world. In America, where they were republished entire or in part again and again, “quoted in every colonial newspaper from Boston to Savannah,” and referred to repeatedly in the pamphlet literature, the writings of Trenchard and Gordon ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced.19
Standing with Trenchard and Gordon as early eighteenth-century “preceptors of civil liberty” was the liberal Anglican bishop, Benjamin Hoadly. This “best hated clergyman of the century amongst his own order,” as Leslie Stephen described him — honored and promoted by an administration that despised him but could not do without him — achieved fame, or notoriety, in England for his role in the elaborate clerical polemics of the “Bangorian Controversy” (1717–1720), in which he had been assisted by Gordon. In the course of this bitter and voluminous debate he had become an object of scorn and vituperation as well as of admiration in England; but in the colonies he was widely held to be one of the notable figures in the history of political thought. Anglicans in America, it was true, like their co-denominationalists at home, could scarcely endorse his extraordinary denial of sacerdotal powers for the Church hierarchy or his almost unbelievable repudiation of the whole idea of the church visible, nor could they, in theory at least, accept his extreme toleration of dissent. But their attention focused not on his views of the Church but on the crucial battles he had fought early in the century against the non-jurors and their doctrines of divine right and passive obedience, and on the extreme statements of Whig political theory in his treatise The Original and Institution of Civil Government Discussed (1710) and in certain of his many tracts, especially The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrates Considered (1705). Ultimately, Hoadly came to embody physically the continuity of the conglomerate tradition of English radical and opposition thought, for though he had been active at the end of the seventeenth century, he lived on until 1761, associating in his very old age with the English radicals of Jefferson’s generation and establishing contact with such spokesmen of advanced American thought as Jonathan Mayhew.20
With Hoadly, among his contemporaries, though below him in importance to the Americans, was the outstanding opponent in Parliament of Walpole’s administration, the leader of a coterie of early eighteenth-century freethinking Whigs, Robert Viscount Molesworth. Friend of Trenchard and Gordon, encomiast of Cato’s Letters (they were frequently attributed to him), he was known particularly in the colonies for his Account of Denmark (1694), which detailed the process by which free states succumb to absolutism.21 An opposition leader of another sort who contributed in a more complicated way to the colonists’ inheritance of early eighteenth-century thought was the spectacular Jacobite politician, writer, and philosopher, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. His Craftsman, appearing weekly or semiweekly for a full ten years, from 1726 to 1736, roasted Walpole’s administration in crackling fires of ridicule and denunciation. Its savage, bitter, relentless attacks were indistinguishable from Cato’s polemics on major points of political criticism. The Craftsman, in fact, quoted the writings of Trenchard and Gordon freely, and otherwise, in almost identical language, decried the corruption of the age and warned of the dangers of incipient autocracy.22 The Scottish philosopher, Francis Hutcheson, and the nonconformist schoolmaster, Philip Doddridge, were also figures of this generation the colonists knew and cited in the same general context, as was Isaac Watts, the hymnologist and writer on questions of church and education.23
The tradition continued into the Revolutionaries’ own generation, promoted by Richard Baron, republican and dissenter, associate and literary heir of Thomas Gordon, who republished in the 1750’s political works of Milton and Sidney and issued also an anthology of the writings of the later radicals, including Jonathan Mayhew; and promoted even more effectively by that extraordinary one-man propaganda machine in the cause of liberty, the indefatigable Thomas Hollis, whose correspondence in the 1760’s first with Mayhew and then with Andrew Eliot illustrates vividly the directness of the influence of this radical and opposition tradition on the ideological origins of the Revolution. In the Revolutionary years proper a group of still younger writers renewed the earlier ideas, extended them still further, and, together with the leading spokesmen for the colonies, applied them to the Anglo-American controversy. Foremost among these later English advocates of reform in politics and religion were Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and John Cartwright; but the key book of this generation was the three-volume Political Disquisitions published in 1774 by the schoolmaster, political theorist, and moralis
t, James Burgh.24 The republican historian Catharine Macaulay, whose History of England has aptly been called “an imaginative work in praise of republican principles under the title of a History of England,” was also an important intellectual figure of this generation to the colonists, but among the many Whig historians the Americans knew and referred to — including Bulstrode Whitelock, Gilbert Burnet, William Guthrie, and James Ralph — their preference was for the exiled Huguenot, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras. His “inestimable treasure,” the vast, radically Whiggish Histoire d’Angleterre, published in English between 1725 and 1731, together with his earlier sketch of the whole, A Dissertation on the … Whigs and Tories (1717: reprinted in Boston in 1773), provided indisputable proof of the theories of all of the radical and anti-establishment writers by demonstrating their validity through a thousand years of English history.25 But all history, not only English history, was vital to the thought of the Revolutionary generation, and it is a matter of particular consequence that among the best, or at least the most up-to-date, translations of Sallust and Tacitus available to the colonists were those by the ubiquitous Thomas Gordon, “under whose hands [Tacitus] virtually became an apologist for English Whiggery”; he prefaced his translations with introductory “Discourses” of prodigious length in which he explained beyond all chance of misunderstanding the political and moral meaning of those ancient historians.26
To say simply that this tradition of opposition thought was quickly transmitted to America and widely appreciated there is to understate the fact. Opposition thought, in the form it acquired at the turn of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, was devoured by the colonists. From the earliest years of the century it nourished their political thought and sensibilities. There seems never to have been a time after the Hanoverian succession when these writings were not central to American political expression or absent from polemical politics. James Franklin’s New England Courant began excerpting Cato’s Letters eleven months after the first of them appeared in London; before the end of 1722 his brother Benjamin had incorporated them into his Silence Dogood papers.27 Isaac Norris I in 1721 ordered his London bookseller to send him the separate issues of The Independent Whig as they appeared, and that whole collection was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1724 and 1740. John Peter Zenger’s famous New York Weekly Journal (1733 ff.) was in its early years a veritable anthology of the writings of Trenchard and Gordon.28 By 1728, in fact, Cato’s Letters had already been fused with Locke, Coke, Pufendorf, and Grotius to produce a prototypical American treatise in defense of English liberties overseas, a tract indistinguishable from any number of publications that would appear in the Revolutionary crisis fifty years later.29 So popular and influential had Cato’s Letters become in the colonies within a decade and a half of their first appearance, so packed with ideological meaning, that, reinforced by Addison’s universally popular play Cato30 and the colonists’ selectively Whiggish reading of the Roman historians, it gave rise to what might be called a “Catonic” image, central to the political theory of the time, in which the career of the half-mythological Roman and the words of the two London journalists merged indistinguishably. Everyone who read the Boston Gazette of April 26, 1756, understood the double reference, bibliographical and historical, that was intended by an anonymous writer who concluded an address to the people of Massachusetts — as he put it without further explanation — “in the words of Cato to the freeholders of Great Britain.”
Testimonies to the unique influence of this opposition literature — evidences of this great “hinterland of belief”31 from which would issue the specific arguments of the American Revolution — are everywhere in the writings of eighteenth-century Americans. Sometimes they are explicit, as when Jonathan Mayhew wrote that, having been “initiated, in youth, in the doctrines of civil liberty, as they were taught by such men … as Sidney and Milton, Locke, and Hoadly, among the moderns, I liked them; they seemed rational”; or when John Adams insisted, against what he took to be the massed opinion of informed Englishmen, that the root principles of good government could be found only in “Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly”; or again, when he listed the great political thinkers of 1688 as “Sidney, Locke, Hoadly, Trenchard, Gordon, Plato Redivivus [Neville]”; or when Josiah Quincy, Jr., bequeathed to his son in 1774 “Algernon Sidney’s works, — John Locke’s works, — Lord Bacon’s works, — Gordon’s Tacitus, — and Cato’s Letters. May the spirit of liberty rest upon him!”32 More often, the evidence is implicit, in the degree to which the pamphleteers quoted from, plagiarized, and modeled their writings on Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig. Above all, their influence may be seen in the way the peculiar bent of mind of the writers in this tradition was reflected in the ideas and attitudes of the Americans.
The fact is easily mistaken because on the main points of theory the eighteenth-century contributors to this tradition were not original. Borrowing heavily from more original thinkers, they were often, in their own time and after, dismissed as mere popularizers. Their key concepts — natural rights, the contractual basis of society and government, the uniqueness of England’s liberty-preserving “mixed” constitution — were commonplaces of the liberal thought of the time. But if the elements of their thought were ordinary, the emphasis placed upon them and the use made of them were not. Pride in the liberty-preserving constitution of Britain was universal in the political literature of the age, and everyone agreed on the moral qualities necessary to preserve a free government. But where the mainstream purveyors of political thought spoke mainly with pride of the constitutional and political achievements of Georgian England, the opposition writers, no less proud of the heritage, viewed their circumstances with alarm, “stressed the danger to England’s ancient heritage and the loss of pristine virtue,” studied the processes of decay, and dwelt endlessly on the evidences of corruption they saw about them and the dark future these malignant signs portended. They were the Cassandras of the age, and while their maledictions “were used for party purposes … what [they] said about antique virtue, native liberty, public spirit, and the dangers of luxury and corruption was of general application” and was drawn from the common repository of political lore. They used the commonplaces of the age negatively, critically. They were the enemies of complacence in one of the most complacent eras in England’s history. Few of these writers would have agreed with the sentiment expressed by the Lord Chancellor of England in 1766 and concurred in by the overwhelming majority of eighteenth-century Englishmen: “I seek for the liberty and constitution of this kingdom no farther back than the [Glorious] Revolution; there I make my stand.”33 Few of them accepted the Glorious Revolution and the lax political pragmatism that had followed as the final solution to the political problems of the time. They refused to believe that the transfer of sovereignty from the crown to Parliament provided a perfect guarantee that the individual would be protected from the power of the state. Ignoring the complacence and general high level of satisfaction of the time, they called for vigilance against the government of Walpole equal to what their predecessors had shown against the Stuarts. They insisted, at a time when government was felt to be less oppressive than it had been for two hundred years, that it was necessarily — by its very nature — hostile to human liberty and happiness; that, properly, it existed only on the tolerance of the people whose needs it served; and that it could be, and reasonably should be, dismissed — overthrown — if it attempted to exceed its proper jurisdiction.
It was the better to maintain this vigil against government that they advocated reforms — political reforms, not social or economic reforms, for these were eighteenth- not nineteenth- or twentieth-century English radicals34 — beyond anything admissible in Walpole’s age, or indeed in any age that followed in England until well into the nineteenth century. At one time or another, one or another of them argued for adult manhood suffrage; elimination of the rotten borough system and the substitution of regular units
of representation systematically related to the distribution of population; the binding of representatives to their constituencies by residential requirements and by instructions; alterations in the definition of seditious libel so as to permit full freedom of the press to criticize government; and the total withdrawal of government control over the practice of religion.
Such ideas, based on extreme solicitude for the individual and an equal hostility to government, were expressed in a spirit of foreboding and fear for the future. For while they acknowledged the existing stability and prosperity of England, they nevertheless grounded their thought in pessimism concerning human nature and in the discouraging record of human weakness. Their resulting concern was continuously deepened by the scenes they saw around them. Politics under Walpole may have been stable, but the stability rested, they believed, on the systematic corruption of Parliament by the executive, which, they warned, if left unchecked, would eat away the foundations of liberty. The dangers seemed great, for they saw, as J. G. A. Pocock has written in outlining “the ‘Country’ vision of English politics as it appears in a multitude of writings in the half century that follows 1675,” that