The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  How widespread the fear was in America that corruption was ripening in the home country, sapping the foundations of that most famous citadel of liberty, may be seen not only in the general popularity of periodicals like The Craftsman and Cato’s Letters, which repeatedly excoriated the degeneracy of the age and the viciousness of ministerial corruption, but in the deliberateness with which some of the most vituperative of the English jeremiads were selected for republication in the colonies. There is no more sustained and intense attack on the corruption of Augustan England than James Burgh’s Britain’s Remembrancer: or, The Danger Not Over … (London, 1746), which had been touched off by the shock of the ’Forty-five. Its perfervid denunciation of “our degenerate times and corrupt nation” — a people wallowing in “luxury and irreligion … venality, perjury, faction, opposition to legal authority, idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, lewdness, excessive gaming, robberies, clandestine marriages, breach of matrimonial vows, self-murders … a legion of furies sufficient to rend any state or empire that ever was in the world to pieces” — this blasting denunciation could scarcely have been improved upon by the most sulphurous of Puritan patriarchs. The pamphlet was reprinted by Franklin the year after its initial appearance; reprinted again the following year by another printer in Philadelphia; and reprinted still again in Boston in 1759. So too the lengthy lament, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, written by the fashionable belletrist and Church of England preacher, Dr. John Brown, despairing of the prospects of liberty in England (“We are rolling to the brink of a precipice that must destroy us”), decrying the “vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY” of the British people, and attributing the “weaken[ing of] the foundations of our constitution” to the deliberate corruption of the Commons by Robert Walpole, was reprinted in Boston in 1758, a year after its first publication.32

  Such charges were not allowed to dissipate. They were repeatedly reinforced by the testimony of direct experience. Letters from England expressed in personal terms what print impersonally conveyed — letters not only from such doctrinaire libertarians as Thomas Hollis but also from such undogmatic conservatives as the printer William Strahan, who wondered, he wrote David Hall in Philadelphia in 1763, whether England had “virtue enough to be saved from that deluge of corruption with which we have been so long overwhelmed.”33 The same question had long since occurred to Americans visiting England for business, pleasure, or education. Lewis Morris, in London in 1735–36 to recover the political losses he had sustained in New York at the hands of Governor Cosby, returned home with so intense a disgust at the scenes he had beheld that he took to poetry to relieve his feelings. His 700-line poem, “The Dream and Riddle” echoed the many despairing pamphlets, poems, and squibs published in London in the 1720’s and early 1730’s in ridiculing the justice of the English government (“Complaints if just are very shocking things; / And not encouraged in the courts of Kings”); the venality of the court (“… our noble Prince’s ear / Is open to complaints, and he will hear; / The difficulty’s how to get them there”); the mores of shopkeepers (“The gaudy shops of this tumultuous hive / By several arts of cheating only thrive”); and the corruption of Parliament (“Both senates and their chosers vote for pay / And both alike their liberty betray”). He ended with what would become a characteristic American response: “If bound unto that land of liberty / I just described, then know it is not nigh [i.e., in England], / But lies far distant from this place somewhere / Not in this, but some other hemisphere.”34

  But Morris had been a casual visitor, and, as he discovered to his dismay, he was ignorant of the intricacies of backroom politics in England. Benjamin Franklin knew England and its politics better, and loved that country and its people. Yet he wrote to Peter Collinson in 1753: “I pray God long to preserve to Great Britain the English laws, manners, liberties, and religion notwithstanding the complaints so frequent in your public papers of the prevailing corruption and degeneracy of your people. I know you have a great deal of virtue still subsisting among you, and I hope the constitution is not so near a dissolution as some seem to apprehend. I do not think you are generally become such slaves to your vices as to draw down that justice Milton speaks of” in Paradise Lost. The tide, he comfortingly added, “is never so low but it may rise again.” Yet it might not; and should the worst happen,

  should this dreaded fatal change happen in my time, how should I, even in the midst of the affliction, rejoice if we [in America] have been able to preserve those invaluable treasures, and can invite the good among you to come and partake of them! O let not Britain seek to oppress us, but like an affectionate parent endeavor to secure freedom to her children; they may be able one day to assist her in defending her own.35

  So too John Dickinson, in England in the election year 1754 as a student of law, was enthralled by the sophistication and variety of life in London, and “filled with awe and reverence” by his contact with scenes of ancient greatness and by the opportunity to hear “some of the greatest men in England, perhaps in the world.” But he was shocked, too, beyond all expectation, by Hogarthian election scenes and by the callous disregard of freedom exhibited in Parliament. Over £1,000,000, he wrote his father, had been expended in efforts to manipulate the general election. The starting price for the purchase of votes in one northern borough, he reported, was 200 guineas.

  It is astonishing to think what impudence and villainy are practiced on this occasion. If a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desired, he is made dead drunk and kept in that state, never heard of by his family or friends till all is over and he can do no harm. The oath of their not being bribed is as strict and solemn as language can form it, but is so little regarded that few people can refrain from laughing while they take it. I think the character of Rome will equally suit this nation: “Easy to be bought, if there was but a purchaser.”

  The fact that over seventy elections were disputed, he continued a few months later, is “one of the greatest proofs perhaps of the corruption of the age that can be mentioned.”

  Bribery is so common that it is thought there is not a borough in England where it is not practiced, and it is certain that many very flourishing ones are ruined, their manufactories decayed, and their trade gone by their dependence on what they get by their votes. We hear every day in Westminster Hall leave moved to file informations for bribery, but it is ridiculous and absurd to pretend to curb the effects of luxury and corruption in one instance or in one spot without a general reformation of manners, which everyone sees is absolutely necessary for the welfare of this kingdom. Yet Heaven knows how it can be effected. It is grown a vice here to be virtuous … People are grown too polite to have an old-fashioned religion, and are too weak to find out a new, from whence follows the most unbounded licentiousness and utter disregard of virtue, which is the unfailing cause of the destruction of all empires.

  And in the House of Lords he heard speeches that could only be interpreted as acquiescence in the creation of a standing army. “But such is the complacency these great men have for the smiles of their prince that they will gratify every desire of ambition and power at the expense of truth, reason, and their country.”36

  So too Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote from London in 1760 after twelve years of study and travel abroad that “a change in our constitution is I think near at hand. Our dear-bought liberty stands upon the brink of destruction.” His father, who had also been educated abroad, agreed: “Things seem to be tending hastily to anarchy in England;” he wrote his son in 1763, “corruption and freedom cannot long subsist together … for my part I think an absolute government preferable to one that is only apparently free; and this must be the case of your present constitution, if it be true that whoever presides in the treasury can command in Parliament.” At home in Maryland two years later it seemed more evident than ever to the younger Carroll that the English constitution was “hastening to its final period of dissolution, and the symptoms of a general decay are but too visible
.” Sell your estate in England, he advised an English friend, and

  purchase lands in this province where liberty will maintain her empire till a dissoluteness of morals, luxury, and venality shall have prepared the degenerate sons of some future age to prefer their own mean lucre, the bribes, and the smiles of corruption and arbitrary ministers to patriotism, to glory, and to the public weal. No doubt the same causes will produce the same effects, and a period is already set to the reign of American freedom; but that fatal time seems to be at a great distance. The present generation at least, and I hope many succeeding ones, in spite of a corrupt Parliament, will enjoy the blessings and the sweets of liberty.

  Later, Carroll’s father, further informed of the realities of European life not only by his well-traveled son but by “daily papers, periodical and occasional pamphlets” as well, enlarged upon the theme in letters to his English friends:

  What must be the end of this shameless, long-continued want of honor, public spirit, and patriotism? Will not your profligacy, corruption, and versatility sink you into anarchy and destruction? All states laboring under the same vices have met with the fate which will be your lot. That fate is impending; it cannot be far off. The same causes will ever produce similar effects … are you not a people devoted to and on the brink of destruction? I began to be acquainted with the world in the year 1720, memorable by the ruin of not only the unthinking adventurers in the South Sea stock but of numberless widows, helpless minors, and innocent infants … Soon after Sir Robert Walpole was made premier he reduced corruption into a regular system which since his time to the present period has been improved and founded on so broad and solid a basis as to threaten the constitution with immediate ruin and already to have left to the people little more than the appearance of liberty.37

  In the context of such beliefs the question inevitably arose “whether we are obliged to yield,” as Jonathan Mayhew put it in his famous Discourse of 1750, “an absolute submission to our prince, or whether disobedience and resistance may not be justifiable in some cases.” The answer was clear. Submission is not required “to all who bear the title of rulers in common, but only to those who actually perform the duty of rulers, by exercising a reasonable and just authority for the good of human society.” When government fails to serve its proper ends then “a regard to the public welfare ought to make us withhold from our rulers that obedience and subjection which it would, otherwise, be our duty to render to them.” In such situations one is “bound to throw off [his] allegiance”; not to do so would be tacitly to conspire “in promoting slavery and misery.”

  For a nation thus abused to arise unanimously and to resist their prince, even to the dethroning him, is not criminal, but a reasonable way of vindicating their liberties and just rights; it is making use of the means, and the only means, which God has put into their power, for mutual and self-defense. And it would be highly criminal in them not to make use of this means. It would be stupid tameness and unaccountable folly for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious, and cruel man to wanton and riot in their misery. And in such a case it would, of the two, be more rational to suppose that they that did NOT resist [rather] than that they who did, would receive to themselves damnation.

  When tyranny is abroad, “submission,” Andrew Eliot wrote quite simply in 1765, “is a crime.”38

  1. [James Otis], Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel … (Boston, 1765), p. 24; Adams, Diary and Autobiography, I, 255. Cf. Charles Carroll: “power (understood as force),” Maryland Historical Magazine, 12 (1917), 187.

  2. K. R. Minogue, “Power in Politics,” Political Studies, 7 (1959), 271.

  3. The examples quoted here, selected from innumerable discussions of power in the literature before 1776, are from: America, A Poem. By Alexander Martin … to Which Is Added, Liberty. A Poem. By Rusticus … ([Philadelphia, 1769?]: JHL Pamphlet 31), p. [17]; [William Hicks], Considerations upon the Rights of the Colonists to the Privileges of British Subjects … (New York, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 18), p. 15; Richard J. Hooker, ed., “John Dickinson on Church and State,” American Literature, 16 (1944–45), 90; John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, in Works, III, 457; [Moses Mather], America’s Appeal to the Impartial World … (Hartford, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 59), p. 22; and John Adams (“Novanglus”), in Works, IV, 43. So also Jonathan Mayhew: “Power is of a grasping, encroaching nature … [it] aims at extending itself and operating according to mere will wherever it meets with no balance, check, control, or opposition of any kind.” The Snare Broken … (Boston, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 20), p. 34; and “Power is like avarice, its desire increases by gratification,” Newport Mercury, July 30, 1764.

  The discussion of power, in precisely these terms, may be traced back through the political literature of mid-eighteenth-century America to seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sources. See, for example, Boston Gazette and Country Journal, May 10, 1756, which contains a discourse on power and liberty; New York Mercury, October 15, 1753, where an essay on balance in government as “the firmest barrier against unlimited power … our whole constitution, so nicely poised between too much power and too much liberty,” is fashioned from extracts from William Oldisworth’s A Dialogue Between Timothy and Philatheus … (London, 1709), one of the many answers to Matthew Tindall’s proscribed Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706); New York Evening Post, December 7, 1747, on disputes between power and liberty; John Wright’s speech of 1741, quoting “a noted professor of law” who said that power “may justly be compared to a great river, which, while kept within due bounds, is both beautiful and useful, but when it overflows its banks … brings destruction and desolation where it comes” (Robert Proud, History of Pennsylvania … [Philadelphia, 1798], II, 224n); Cato’s Letters, nos. 25, 33, 73, 115 (“Unlimited power is so wild and monstrous a thing that however natural it be to desire it, it is as natural to oppose it; nor ought it to be trusted with any mortal man, be his intentions ever so upright … It is the nature of power to be ever encroaching … It is dominion, it is power which [the Jacobite clergy] court” [6th ed., London, 1755, IV, 81–82, 214]); The Craftsman, nos. 180, 213; Benjamin Hoadly, Works (John Hoadly, ed., London, 1773), II, 25; Locke, Second Treatise of Government, i, 3; iii, 17.

  4. [Richard Bland], An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies … (Williamsburg, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 17), pp. 5, 25; [John Joachim Zubly], An Humble Enquiry … ([Charleston], 1769: JHL Pamphlet 28), p. 26; [John Dickinson], An Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great-Britain over the Colonies in America … (Philadelphia, 1774), p. 108 (reprinted in Pennsylvania Archives, 2d ser., III, 610). See also, [William Hicks], The Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power Considered … (Philadelphia, 1768: JHL Pamphlet 24), pp. 21, 27. Cf. Cato’s Letters, no. 33: “Now, because liberty chastises and shortens power, therefore power would extinguish liberty; and consequently liberty has too much cause to be exceeding jealous, and always upon her defense. Power has many advantages over her … and whereas power can, and for the most part does, subsist where liberty is not, liberty cannot subsist without power, so that she has, as it were, the enemy always at her gates.” So also, no. 73: “Alas! Power encroaches daily upon liberty, with a success too evident, and the balance between them is almost lost.” The implicitly sexual character of the imagery is made quite explicit in passages of the libertarian literature, e.g., in Marchamont Nedham’s Excellencie of a Free State (1656): “the interest of freedom is a virgin, that everyone seeks to deflower”; if it is not properly protected “(so great is the lust of mankind after dominion) there follows a rape upon the first opportunity” (in Richard Baron’s 1767 ed., pp. 18–19).

  5. Andrew Eliot, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Francis Bernard … (Boston, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 15), p. 17; Adams, Diary and Autobiography. I, 282; II, 58; Peter Whitney, The Transgressions of a Land … (Boston. 1774), pp. 21–22. Whitney’s thought — indeed his very phraseology — echoes through the opposition literature of early eighteent
h-century England and in the many discussions of power and government published in the colonies. Thus, for example, Prideaux’s doubt “whether the benefit which the world receives from government be sufficient to make amends for the calamities which it suffers from the follies, mistakes, and maladministration of those that manage it” was quoted in Cato’s Letters, no. 31, May 27, 1721 (“Considerations on the Weakness and Inconsistencies of Human Nature,” as republished, fifth ed., London, 1758. I, 241); the same quotation, properly attributed and identical in every detail, appears at the head of an essay on the “propensity of men in power to oppress the people” that was copied from an unnamed “northern paper” into the South Carolina Gazette, July 29–August 1, 1748. This borrowed essay, which is a classic example of the application to colonial politics of the language of English opposition ideology, appears between two issues of the South Carolina Gazette made up almost entirely of selections from Cato’s Letters, the issue of July 25–29 republishing in its entirety Cato’s Letters, no. 37 (“Character of a Good and of an Evil Magistrate, Quoted from Algernon Sidney, Esq.”), the issue of August 1–8 republishing no. 38 (“The Right and Capacity of the People to Judge of Government”). The “northern paper” was in all probability The Independent Advertiser of Boston, which ran the same two numbers of Cato’s Letters, also without attribution, on May 16 and February 29 of the same year.

  6. Eliot, Sermon (JHL 15), pp. 10–11; [Daniel Dulany], Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes (Annapolis, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 13), p. 41: “for mankind are generally so fond of power that they are oftener tempted to exercise it beyond the limits of justice than induced to set bounds to it from the pure consideration of the rectitude of forbearance”; The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders … of … Boston … (Boston, [1772]: JHL Pamphlet 36), p. 20; [Jonathan Boucher], A Letter from a Virginian … ([New York], 1774: JHL Pamphlet 46), p. 7; Oliver Noble, Some Strictures upon the … Book of Esther … (Newburyport, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 58), p. 5; The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 70), p. 5 (quoting [Obadiah Hulme’s] An Historical Essay on the English Constitution [1771]); Josiah Quincy, Jr., Observations on the … Boston Port-Bill; with Thoughts on … Standing Armies (Boston, 1774), in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun.… (Boston, 1825), pp. 372–373; Whitney, Transgressions, pp. 21–22; Zabdiel Adams, The Grounds of Confidence and Success in War … (Boston, 1775), p. 5; Adams, Diary and Autobiography, II, 59.