The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  18. Adams, Works, III, 481; cf. Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 69), p. 21. On the background of the problem in European thought, see Gwyn, Separation of Powers, pp. 5–8, 101, 103, 106, 110–111.

  19. Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (JHL 2), pp. 4, 5, 7.

  20. Thus Dickinson: “… the government here is not only mixed but dependent, which circumstance occasions a peculiarity in its form of a very delicate nature” (Farmer’s Letters [JHL 23], p. 58). This peculiarity, and the constitutional difficulties it involved, had long been noticed. In 1711 the astute Governor Hunter of New York warned Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, that if the New York Council successfully claimed the “rights and privileges of a House of Peers,” since the Assembly already claimed the privileges of a House of Commons, the colony would become “a body politic coordinate with (claiming equal powers) and consequently independent of the Great Council of the realm,” adding for authority Harrington’s idiosyncratic formula, which he quoted exactly, but without attribution: “as national or independent empire is to be exercised by them that have the proper balance of dominion in the nation, so provincial or dependent empire is not to be exercised by them that have the balance of dominion in the province, because that would bring the government from provincial and dependent to national and independent.” E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York … (Albany, 1856–1887), V, 255–256; cf. Oceana (S. B. Liljegren, ed., Heidelberg, 1924), p. 18. While by the mid-eighteenth century there was general agreement that the colonial governments were miniatures of the English government whose discrepancies from the model “doubtless in time will be rectified” (William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political …, Boston, 1749–1751, I, 215), it was equally apparent that the colonial legislatures did not have “a corresponding power with that of the Parliament in Great Britain … If the three branches [of the colonial Assemblies] united have equal power [with that of Parliament], then each of them have separately the same: and so a house of representatives has power equal to the House of Commons, the council to the House of Lords, and a governor to the King, which is absurd … The truth is, we are all of us British subjects, from the greatest to the least, subject to British laws and entitled to British privileges … that a government in America is not equal there to the Parliament of Great Britain is evident from this one consideration, that the former have not power to make laws repugnant or contrary to the laws of the latter.” Boston Gazette and Country Journal, May 10, 1756. Yet it could also be assumed — and the assumption would ultimately flower into the most advanced Revolutionary views of the imperial constitution — that the colonists upon leaving England had “totally disclaim[ed] all subordination to a dependence upon the two inferior estates of their mother country” (Hicks, Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power [JHL 24], p. 6), and that therefore from the start their Assemblies had been equivalent bodies to the Houses of Parliament, forming complete mixed polities in their separate affiliation with the King. As a consequence the question of how the colonies shared in “the democracy” of the English constitution became a matter of critical importance at the height of the crisis. See, e.g., Joseph Warren, An Oration … (Boston, 1772: JHL Pamphlet 35), pp. 9–10; Adams (“Novanglus”), Works, IV, pp. 100 ff., and Hutchinson’s message of 1772 cited in note 16 above. Behind the lack of definition of the imperial constitution before 1763 and of the colonies’ involvement in it lay the more basic question of the meaning of the British “empire” itself. The concept when applied to the American colonies had only a special and restricted meaning. See Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, England, 1961), chap. iii, esp. pp. 77.

  21. New York Evening Post, November 16, 1747; Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended … (Hartford, 1775), p. 13 (cf. p. 9); [John Allen], The Watchman’s Alarm to Lord N - - - h … (Salem, 1774), p. [5]. As Allen points out, his definition of liberty — “the true etymology of the word” — was taken from Daniel Fenning’s Royal English Dictionary (London, 1761). He might equally well have attributed his definition to the elaborate discussion of liberty in Cato’s Letters, nos. 62 and 63; to the casual reference in The Spectator, no. 287; or to various passages in Montesquieu, Rapin, or Bolingbroke. Cf. Neumann’s Introduction to The Spirit of the Laws, pp. xlix–liii.

  22. [John Dickinson], An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados … (Philadelphia, 1766), in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson (Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, XIV, Philadelphia, 1895), p. 262; [James Otis], A Vindication of the British Colonies … (Boston, 1765: JHL Pamphlet 11), p. 8; Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), pp. 7–8.

  23. Dulany, Considerations (JHL 13), p. 30; Votes and Proceedings of Boston (JHL 36), p. 8; Otis, Vindication (JHL 11), p. 32.

  24. Mather, America’s Appeal (JHL 59), p. 8; Lovell, Oration, p. 11.

  25. Cato’s Letters, no. 73; New York Gazette: or, The Weekly Post Boy, November 1, 1756, quoting at length “a survey of the kingdoms of the earth” that appeared in the eleventh essay by “Virginia-Centinel,” originally published in the Virginia Gazette in September or October 1756. (Essay 10, the only one of the original group that is extant, was published in the September 3, 1756, issue of the Virginia Gazette.) For an almost identical account of “the deplorable state of your fellow-creatures in other countries,” see the New York Mercury, May 22, 1758, reprinting an essay from the Pennsylvania Journal which in turn quoted long extracts from “a late writer in an address to the farmers of England.”

  26. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies (JHL 7), p. 31; Bland, Inquiry (JHL 17), pp. 7–8; Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, August 13, 1776, Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Julian P. Boyd, ed., Princeton, 1950–), I, 492; Hicks, Considerations (JHL 18) p. 2; [James Wilson], Considerations on the … Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774: JHL Pamphlet 44), p. 12; Adams, Dissertation, in Works, III, 451; Otis, Rights of the British Colonies (JHL 7), p. 70. The pamphlets contain a good deal of discussion of English history, for much of the intellectual coherence of the colonists’ political arguments rested on their views of the past. The ancient, presumably Saxon, origins of the English constitution was of particular importance to them, though, as John Adams pointed out, the Saxon constitution was “involved in much obscurity … the monarchical and democratic factions in England, by their opposite endeavors to make the Saxon constitutions swear for their respective systems, have much increased the difficulty of determining … what that constitution, in many important particulars, was” (Works, III, 543). Most agreed with Charles Carroll that “the liberties which the English enjoyed under their Saxon kings were wrested from them by the Norman conqueror,” but differed with him on the idea (which seems to have been Rapin’s view also) that only at the close of the reign of Henry III could there be found “the first faint traces of the House of Commons” (Elihu S. Riley, ed., Correspondence of “First Citizen” — Charles Carroll of Carrollton, … and “Antilon” — Daniel Dulany, Jr.…, Baltimore, 1902, p. 212). Maurice Moore admitted that “whether the Commons of England made up a part of the Saxon Witan Moot hath been a subject of great dispute,” but cited Spelman and Madox to the effect that the Commons in the ancient constitution, while not apparently meeting regularly, was summoned when taxation was to be discussed, a practice abolished at the conquest and only slowly thereafter recovered (The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies … [Wilmington, N. C., 1765: JHL Pamphlet 16], pp. 3–4). Richard Bland cited Petyt, Brady, Rapin, and particularly Tacitus to establish the ancient, Saxon antecedents of the actual representation of all freeholders in Parliament, but, concentrating on the lack of such a franchise in eighteenth-century England (“the putrid part of the constitution”), ignored the conquest altogether (Inquiry [JHL 17], pp. 7–10). William Hicks too passed silently over the “Saxon” era and wrote vaguely of the establishment of constitutional liberty in post-conquest strugg
les (Considerations [JHL 18], pp. 2–4; Nature and Extent of Parliamentary Power [JHL 24], p. 3). But the view most characteristic of the Revolutionary pamphleteers is that summarized in the text paragraph above, which postulated an ideal constitution based on an elected assembly in Saxon England, destroyed by the conquest, regained with modifications in the course of centuries of struggle that culminated in the Glorious Revolution, and that was once again challenged by the corruption of eighteenth-century politics. In accepting this view the colonists sought not to undermine Parliamentary authority as such but to establish its true character in its ancient origins in such a way as to emphasize the corruptions of the Parliament of George III. Cf. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, esp. chap. ii, and the same author’s articles on Dickinson and Jefferson, in Pa. Mag., 83 (1959), 280–292, and W.M.Q., 3d ser., 15 (1958), 56–70. For Rapin’s account of the ancient origins of the English constitution, linking pre-conquest institutions to eighteenth-century politics, see his Dissertation on the … Whigs and Tories [1717] (Boston, 1773), pp. 6–16; for his elaborate and inconclusive discussion of the pre-conquest origins of Parliament, see his Dissertation on the Government, Laws … of the Anglo-Saxons, Particularly, the Origin, Nature, and Privileges of Their Wittena-Gemot, or Parliament …, published in volume II (London, 1728) of his History of England, pp. [135]–210. On the historiographical background of these views, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, England, 1951), esp. chap. ii; Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), chap. iii; David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (London, 1951), esp. chap. vi; and Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (Cambridge, 1952), chap. ii, esp. pp. 146 ff.

  27. Adams, Dissertation, in Works, III, 451; Jefferson, Summary View (JHL 43), p. 6; Amos Adams, A Concise Historical View of the … Planting … (Boston, 1769), p. 51. See also Judah Champion, A Brief View of the Distresses … Our Ancestors Encountered in Settling New-England … (Hartford, 1770), pp. 10 ff.; and, for an even more local application of the same point of view, James Dana, A Century Discourse … (New Haven, [1770]), pp. 18 ff.

  28. An Argument, pp. 21–22 (in The Pamphleteer, X, 132–133).

  29. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West (Princeton, 1957), chap. i; Koebner, Empire, pp. 93–96.

  30. Two Discourses Delivered October 25, 1759 … (Boston, 1759), pp. 60, 61.

  31. An Argument, p. 5 (in The Pamphleteer, X, 115); Otis, Vindication (JHL 11), p. [3]. This fundamental presumption was repeatedly expressed in the political writings of eighteenth-century America. See, e.g., Zenger’s New York Weekly Journal, December 24, 1733 (“… as causes and effects are things correlative, and the same causes ever had and ever will have the same effects”); O Liberty, Thou Goddess Heavenly Bright … ([New York, 1732] Evans 3595), p. [1] (“men in the same circumstances will do the same things, call them by what names of distinction you please”); the Carrolls’ remarks to the same effect quoted pp. 91–92 below; William Hooper to James Iredell, April 26, 1774, in W. L. Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina (Raleigh, N. C., 1886–1890), V, 985 (“From the fate of Rome, Britain may trace the cause of its present degeneracy and its impending destruction. Similar causes will ever produce similar effects.”); and [James Chalmers], Additions to Plain Truth … (Philadelphia, 1776), p. 128. For an explanation of this belief, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law (Cambridge, 1941), chap. ii, esp. pp. 32–33; on the relation of this notion to the idea of progress, see Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, 1948), chap. iv, esp. pp. 79–86, and Stow Persons, “The Cyclical Theory of History in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly, 6 (1954), 147–163.

  32. Burgh, Britain’s Remembrancer, p. 6; An Estimate (Boston ed.), pp. 11, 19, 60. The phrases quoted from An Estimate are among the many that are underscored in Thomas Hollis’ copy of the book, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (see pp. 15, 29, 115). At the word “weaken” in the passage concerning Walpole, Hollis inked in the words “read: ruined.” Brown’s Estimate was being quoted in Boston even before it was reprinted there: a writer in the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, January 2, 1758, identified the author of The Spirit of the Laws to his readers as a writer “whom Dr. Brown, in his late celebrated Estimates,” approved of!

  33. William Strahan to David Hall, London, February 21, 1763, Pa. Mag., 10 (1886), 89. So also the bookseller, pamphleteer, and printer John Almon, who was to be responsible for so much of the most effective pro-American publicity in England in the 1760’s and 1770’s and who was continuously in touch with American writers, observed in 1765 that “in no age except that which produced the destruction of the Roman liberty were venality and corruption so prevalent as at this time in Britain.” Quoted in Ian Christie, Wilkes, Wyvil and Reform (London, 1962), p. 38.

  34. “The Dream and Riddle. A Poem.” MS in papers relating to Lewis Morris, Robert Morris Papers, Rutgers University Library.

  35. Franklin to Collinson, Philadelphia, May 9, 1753, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Leonard W. Labaree, et al., eds., New Haven, 1959–), IV, 485–486. Among the many English writers Franklin read who confirmed his troubled views of England’s prospects was his old friend James Ralph, whose Of the Use and Abuse of Parliaments … (2 vols., London, 1744) argued “that the constitution is everywhere undermined; at the first sound of the trumpet … it will sink at once into a heap of ruins … So great is the influence of the crown become, so servile the spirit of our grandees, and so depraved the hearts of the people, that hope itself begins to sicken.” Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, p. 128.

  36. H. Trevor Colbourn, ed., “A Pennsylvania Farmer at the Court of King George: John Dickinson’s London Letters, 1754–1756,” Pa. Mag., 86 (1962), 257, 268, 421, 445.

  37. Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Charles Carroll, Sr., London, January 29, 1760, Maryland Historical Magazine, 10 (1915), 251; Charles Carroll, Sr., to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, September 3, 1763, Thomas M. Field, ed., Unpublished Letters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton … (New York, 1902), p. 78; Charles Carroll of Carrollton to Mr. Bradshaw, November 21, 1765, ibid., p. 97; Charles Carroll, Sr., to William Graves, December 23, 1768, Maryland Historical Magazine, 12 (1917), 185. See also, William L. Sachse, The Colonial American in Britain (Madison, 1956), pp. 204–207.

  38. A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (Boston, 1750: JHL Pamphlet 1), pp. 13, 20, 29, 30, 40; Eliot, Sermon (JHL 15), pp. 47–48.

  Chapter IV

  THE LOGIC OF REBELLION

  Lord Chancellor Camden … declared … that for some time he had beheld with silent indignation the arbitrary measures which were pursuing by the ministry; … that, however, he would do so no longer, but would openly and boldly speak his sentiments … In a word, he accused the ministry … of having formed a conspiracy against the liberties of their country.

  — Report of Speech in the House of Lords, 1770

  A series of occurrences, many recent events, … afford great reason to believe that a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty … The august and once revered fortress of English freedom — the admirable work of ages — the BRITISH CONSTITUTION seems fast tottering into fatal and inevitable ruin. The dreadful catastrophe threatens universal havoc, and presents an awful warning to hazard all if, peradventure, we in these distant confines of the earth may prevent being totally overwhelmed and buried under the ruins of our most established rights.

  — Boston Town Meeting to its Assembly Representatives, 1770

  IT IS the meaning imparted to the events after 1763 by this integrated group of attitudes and ideas that lies behind the colonists’ rebellion. In the context of these ideas, the controversial issues centering on the question of Parliament’s jurisdiction in America acquired as a group new and overwhelming significance. The colonists believed they saw emerging from the welter of events during the decade after t
he Stamp Act a pattern whose meaning was unmistakable. They saw in the measures taken by the British government and in the actions of officials in the colonies something for which their peculiar inheritance of thought had prepared them only too well, something they had long conceived to be a possibility in view of the known tendencies of history and of the present state of affairs in England. They saw about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America. The danger to America, it was believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of the greater whole whose ultimate manifestation would be the destruction of the English constitution, with all the rights and privileges embedded in it.

  This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists’ struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition. For, once assumed, it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign.

  It was this — the overwhelming evidence, as they saw it, that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled — that was signaled to the colonists after 1763, and it was this above all else that in the end propelled them into Revolution.

  Suspicion that the ever-present, latent danger of an active conspiracy of power against liberty was becoming manifest within the British Empire, assuming specific form and developing in coordinated phases, rose in the consciousness of a large segment of the American population before any of the famous political events of the struggle with England took place. No adherent of a nonconformist church or sect in the eighteenth century was free from suspicion that the Church of England, an arm of the English state, was working to bring all subjects of the crown into the community of the Church; and since toleration was official and nonconformist influence in English politics formidable, it was doing so by stealth, disguising its efforts, turning to improper uses devices that had been created for benign purposes. In particular, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, an arm of the Church created in 1701 to aid in bringing the Gospel to the pagan Indians, was said by 1763 to have “long had a formal design to root out Presbyterianism, etc., and to establishing both episcopacy and bishops.”1