Most commonly the discussion of power centered on its essential characteristic of aggressiveness: its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries. In expressing this central thought, which explained more of politics, past and present, to them than any other single consideration, the writers of the time outdid themselves in verbal ingenuity. All sorts of metaphors, similes, and analogies were used to express this view of power. The image most commonly used was that of the act of trespassing. Power, it was said over and over again, has “an encroaching nature”; “… if at first it meets with no control [it] creeps by degrees and quick subdues the whole.” Sometimes the image is of the human hand, “the hand of power,” reaching out to clutch and to seize: power is “grasping” and “tenacious” in its nature; “what it seizes it will retain.” Sometimes power “is like the ocean, not easily admitting limits to be fixed in it.” Sometimes it is “like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.” Sometimes it is motion, desire, and appetite all at once, being “restless, aspiring, and insatiable.” Sometimes it is like “jaws … always opened to devour.” It is everywhere in public life, and everywhere it is threatening, pushing, and grasping; and too often in the end it destroys its benign — necessarily benign — victim.3
What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right. The public world these writers saw was divided into distinct, contrasting, and innately antagonistic spheres: the sphere of power and the sphere of liberty or right. The one was brutal, ceaselessly active, and heedless; the other was delicate, passive, and sensitive. The one must be resisted, the other defended, and the two must never be confused. “Right and power,” Richard Bland stated, “have very different meanings, and convey very different ideas”; “power abstracted from right cannot give a just title to dominion,” nor is it possible legitimately, or even logically, to “build right upon power.” When the two are intermingled, when “brutal power” becomes “an irresistible argument of boundless right” as it did, John Dickinson explained, under the Cromwellian dictatorship, innocence and justice can only sigh and quietly submit.4
Not that power was in itself — in some metaphysical sense — evil. It was natural in its origins, and necessary. It had legitimate foundations “in compact and mutual consent” — in those covenants among men by which, as a result of restrictions voluntarily accepted by all for the good of all, society emerges from a state of nature and creates government to serve as trustee and custodian of the mass of surrendered individual powers. Power created legitimately by those voluntary compacts which the colonists knew from Lockean theory to be logical and from their own experience to be practical, power in its legitimate form inhered naturally in government and was the possession and interest of those who controlled government, just as liberty, always weak, always defensive, always, as John Adams put it, “skulking about in corners … hunted and persecuted in all countries by cruel power,” inhered naturally in the people and was their peculiar possession and interest. Liberty was not, therefore, for the colonists, as it is for us, professedly the interest and concern of all, governors and governed alike, but only of the governed. The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous. For “as great a blessing as government is,” the Rev. Peter Whitney explained, “like other blessings, it may become a scourge, a curse, and severe punishment to a people.” What made it so, what turned power into a malignant force, was not its own nature so much as the nature of man — his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.5
On this there was absolute agreement. Everyone, of course, knew that if “weak or ignorant men are entrusted with power” there will be “universal confusion,” for “such exaltation will … make them giddy and vain and deprive them of the little understanding they had before.” But it was not simply a question of what the weak and ignorant will do. The problem was more systematic than that; it concerned “mankind in general.” And the point they hammered home time and again, and agreed on — freethinking Anglican literati no less than neo-Calvinist theologians — was the incapacity of the species, of mankind in general, to withstand the temptations of power. Such is “the depravity of mankind,” Samuel Adams, speaking for the Boston Town Meeting, declared, “that ambition and lust of power above the law are … predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” These are instincts that have “in all nations combined the worst passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind.” Power always and everywhere had had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men. It “converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.” It acts upon men like drink: it “is known to be intoxicating in its nature” — “too intoxicating and liable to abuse.” And nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against these effects of power — certainly not “the united considerations of reason and religion,” for they have never “been sufficiently powerful to restrain these lusts of men.”6
From these central premises on the nature of power and man’s weakness in face of its temptations, there followed a series of important conclusions. Since power “in proportion to its extent is ever prone to wantonness,” Josiah Quincy wrote, and since in the last analysis “the supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined to the use of them,” the absolute danger to liberty lay in the absolute supremacy of “a veteran army” — in making “the civil subordinate to the military,” as Jefferson put it in 1774, “instead of subjecting the military to the civil powers.” Their fear was not simply of armies but of standing armies, a phrase that had distinctive connotations, derived, like so much of their political thought, from the seventeenth century and articulated for them by earlier English writers — in this case most memorably by Trenchard in his famous An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government … (1697). With him the colonists universally agreed that “unhappy nations have lost that precious jewel liberty … [because] their necessities or indiscretion have permitted a standing army to be kept amongst them.” There was, they knew, no “worse state of thraldom than a military power in any government, unchecked and uncontrolled by the civil power”; and they had a vivid sense of what such armies were: gangs of restless mercenaries, responsible only to the whims of the rulers who paid them, capable of destroying all right, law, and liberty that stood in their way.7
This fear of standing armies followed directly from the colonists’ understanding of power and of human nature: on purely logical grounds it was a reasonable fear. But it went beyond mere logic. Only too evidently was it justified, as the colonists saw it, by history and by the facts of the contemporary world. Conclusive examples of what happened when standing armies were permitted to dominate communities were constantly before their minds’ eyes. There was, first and foremost, the example of the Turks, whose rulers — cruel, sensuous “bashaws in their little divans” — were legendary, ideal types of despots who reigned unchecked by right or law or in any sense the consent of the people; their power rested on the swords of their vicious janissaries, the worst of standing armies. So too had the French kings snuffed out the liberties of their subjects “by force” and reduced to nothing the “puny privilege of the French parliaments.” The ranks of “despotic kingdoms” included also Poland, Spain, and Russia; India and Egypt were occasionally mentioned too.8
More interesting than these venerable despotisms, bywords for the rule of force unrestrained by countervailing influences, were a number of despotic states that had within living memory been free and whose enslavement, being recent, had been directly observed, Venice was one: it had once, not so long ago, been a republic, but now it was governed “by one of the worst of despotisms.” Sweden was another; the colonists themselves could remember when the Swedish p
eople had enjoyed liberty to the full; but now, in the 1760’s, they were known to “rejoice at being subject to the caprice and arbitrary power of a tyrant, and kiss their chains.” But the most vivid of these sad cases, because the most closely studied, was that of Denmark. The destruction of parliamentary liberties in Denmark had in fact taken place a century before, but that event, carefully examined in a treatise famous in opposition circles and in America, was experienced as contemporary by the colonists.
Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark (1694) established the general point, implicit in all similar histories but explicit in this one, that the preservation of liberty rested on the ability of the people to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power, and hence in the last analysis rested on the vigilance and moral stamina of the people. Certain forms of government made particularly heavy demands on the virtue of the people. Everyone knew that democracy — direct rule by all the people — required such spartan, self-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race. Other forms, aristocracies, for example, made less extreme demands; but even in them virtue and sleepless vigilance on the part of at least the ruling class were necessary if privilege was to be kept responsible and the inroads of tyranny perpetually blocked off. It had been the lack of this vigilance that had brought liberty in Denmark to its knees, for there a corrupt nobility, more interested in using its privileges for self-indulgence than for service to the state, had dropped its guard and allowed in a standing army which quickly destroyed the constitution and the liberties protected by it.
The converse of all of this was equally true and more directly relevant. The few peoples that had managed to retain their liberties in the face of all efforts of would-be tyrants propelled by the lust for power had been doughty folk whose vigilance had never relaxed and whose virtue had remained uncontaminated. The Swiss, a rustic people locked in mountain sanctuaries, were ancient members of this heroic group; they had won their liberty long ago and had maintained it stubbornly ever after. The Dutch were more recent members, having overthrown the despotic rule of Spain only a century earlier; they too were industrious people of stubborn, Calvinist virtue, and they were led by an alert aristocracy. More recent in their emergence from darkness were the Corsicans, whose revolt against Genoese overlords backed by French power had begun only in 1729; they were still, at the time of the Stamp Act, struggling under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli to maintain their independence and liberty.9
Above all, however, there were the English themselves. The colonists’ attitude to the whole world of politics and government was fundamentally shaped by the root assumption that they, as Britishers, shared in a unique inheritance of liberty. The English people, they believed, though often threatened by despots who had risen in their midst, had managed to maintain, to a greater degree and for a longer period of time than any other people, a tradition of the successful control of power and of those evil tendencies of human nature that would prevent its proper uses.
In view of the natural obstacles that stood in the way of such a success and in view of the dismal history of other nations, this, as the colonists saw it, had been an extraordinary achievement. But it was not a miraculous one. It could be explained historically. The ordinary people of England, they believed, were descended from simple, sturdy Saxons who had known liberty in the very childhood of the race and who, through the centuries, had retained the desire to preserve it. But it had taken more than desire. Reinforcing, structuring, expressing the liberty-loving temper of the people, there was England’s peculiar “constitution,” described by John Adams, in words almost every American agreed with before 1763, as “the most perfect combination of human powers in society which finite wisdom has yet contrived and reduced to practice for the preservation of liberty and the production of happiness.”10
The word “constitution” and the concept behind it was of central importance to the colonists’ political thought; their entire understanding of the crisis in Anglo-American relations rested upon it. So strategically located was this idea in the minds of both English and Americans, and so great was the pressure placed upon it in the course of a decade of pounding debate that in the end it was forced apart, along the seam of a basic ambiguity, to form the two contrasting concepts of constitutionalism that have remained characteristic of England and America ever since.11
At the start of the controversy, however, the most distinguishing feature of the colonists’ view of the constitution was its apparent traditionalism. Like their contemporaries in England and like their predecessors for centuries before, the colonists at the beginning of the Revolutionary controversy understood by the word “constitution” not, as we would have it, a written document or even an unwritten but deliberately contrived design of government and a specification of rights beyond the power of ordinary legislation to alter; they thought of it, rather, as the constituted — that is, existing — arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them. So John Adams wrote that a political constitution is like “the constitution of the human body”; “certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices” some of which “may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.” A constitution of government, analogously, Adams wrote, is “a frame, a scheme, a system, a combination of powers for a certain end, namely, — the good of the whole community.”12
The elements of this definition were traditional, but it was nevertheless distinctive in its emphasis on the animating principles, the stamina vitae, those “fundamental laws and rules of the constitution, which ought never to be infringed.” Belief that a proper system of laws and institutions should be suffused with, should express, essences and fundamentals — moral rights, reason, justice — had never been absent from English notions of the constitution. But not since the Levellers had protested against Parliament’s supremacy in the mid-seventeenth century had these considerations seemed so important as they did to the Americans of the mid-seventeenth century. Nor could they ever have appeared more distinct in their content. For if the ostensible purpose of all government was the good of the people, the particular goal of the English constitution — “its end, its use, its designation, drift, and scope” — was known to all, and declared by all, to be the attainment of liberty. This was its peculiar “grandeur” and excellence; it was for this that it should be prized “next to our Bibles, above the privileges of this world.” It was for this that it should be blessed, supported and maintained, and transmitted “in full, to posterity.”13
But how had this been achieved? What was the secret of this success of the British constitution? It lay in its peculiar capacity to balance and check the basic forces within society. It was common knowledge, expressed in such familiar clichés, a Virginian complained, “that the merest sciolist, the veriest smatterer in politics must long since have had them all by rote,”14 that English society consisted of three social orders, or estates, each with its own rights and privileges, and each embodying within it the principles of a certain form of government: royalty, whose natural form of government was monarchy; the nobility, whose natural form was aristocracy; and the commons, whose form was democracy. In the best of worlds, it had been known since Aristotle, each of these forms independently was capable of creating the conditions for human happiness; in actuality all of them, if unchecked, tended to degenerate into oppressive types of government — tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule — by enlarging their own rights at the expense of the others’ and hence generating not liberty and happiness for all but misery for most. In England, however, these elements of society, each independently dangerous, entered into government in such a way as to eliminate the dangers inherent in each. They entered simultaneously, so to speak, in a balanced sharing of power. The functi
ons, the powers, of government were so distributed among these components of society that no one of them dominated the others. So long as each component remained within its proper sphere and vigilantly checked all efforts of the others to transcend their proper boundaries there would be a stable equilibrium of poised forces each of which, in protecting its own rights against the encroachments of the others, contributed to the preservation of the rights of all.
Such was the theoretical explanation, universally accepted in the eighteenth century, of the famous “mixed” constitution of England.15 It was an arrangement of power that appeared to the colonists as it did to most of Europe as “a system of consummate wisdom and policy.” But if the theory was evident and unanimously agreed on, the mechanics of its operation were not. It was not clear how the three social orders were related to the functioning branches of government. The clarity of the modern assumption of a tripartite division of the functions of government into legislative, executive, and judicial powers did not exist for the colonists (the term “legislative,” for example, was used to mean the whole of government as well as the lawmaking branch), and in any case the balance of the constitution was not expected to be the result of the symmetrical matching of social orders with powers of government: it was not assumed that each estate would singly dominate one of the branches or functions of government.16 What was generally agreed on was what Molesworth wrote in defining a “real Whig” in his Introduction to Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (1711): “one who is exactly for keeping up to the strictness of the true old Gothic constitution, under the three estates of King (or Queen), Lords, and Commons, the legislature being seated in all three together, the executive entrusted with the first but accountable to the whole body of the people, in case of maladministration.” What was agreed on, in other words, primarily and most significantly was that all three social orders did and should enter into and share, by representation or otherwise, the legislative branch. In the legislative functioning of government, Moses Mather explained in terms that commanded universal assent, power was
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