The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  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.28

  Specifics were sought, especially as to the date of the origins of the plot. Josiah Quincy — “Wilkes Quincy,” Hutchinson called him — found it in the Restoration of Charles II; others traced it to the administration of Robert Walpole; and though John Adams, with one eye on Hutchinson, wrote in 1774 that “the conspiracy was first regularly formed and begun to be executed in 1763 or 4,” later he traced it back to the 1750’s and 1740’s and the administration of Governor Shirley of Massachusetts. Nor were the specific stages of its development neglected. They could be traced, if in no other place, in the notorious Hutchinson letters of 1768–69, those “profoundly secret, dark, and deep” letters which, published in 1773, totally exposed Hutchinson’s “machia-vellian dissimulation,” John Adams wrote, and convicted him of “junto conspiracy”; they gave proof, the Boston Committee of Correspondence wrote, that God had “wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies.”29

  But who, specifically, were these enemies, and what were their goals? Josiah Quincy, at the center of affairs in London in the winter of 1774–75, was convinced “that all the measures against America were planned and pushed on by Bernard and Hutchinson.” But most observers believed that local plotters like Hutchinson were only “creatures” of greater figures in England coordinating and impelling forward the whole effort. There were a number of specific identifications of these master influences. One of the most common was the claim that at the root of the evil stood the venerable John Stuart, Lord Bute, whose apparent absence from politics since 1763 could be seen as one of his more successful dissimulations: “he has been aiming for years … to destroy the ancient right of the subjects,” and now was finally taking steps to “overthrow both … King and state; to bring on a revolution, and to place another whom he [is] more nearly allied to upon the throne.” Believing the people to “have too much liberty,” he intended to reduce them to the “spiritless SLAVES” they had been “in the reign of the Stuarts.” So it had seemed to Arthur Lee, who had written from London at the beginning of the period that “Lord Bute, though seemingly retired from the affairs of court, too plainly influences all the operations of government”; the hard facts, he said, lead one to condemn “the unprincipled ambition and partiality of the Scots lord as having produced all the mischiefs of the present period.” Eliot too feared “this mysterious THANE,” declaring in 1769 that “he has too much influence in the public measures.” Five years later John Dickinson still lumped together “the Butes, Mansfields, Norths, Bernards, and Hutchinsons” as the people “whose falsehoods and misrepresentations have enflamed the people,” and as late as 1775 an informed American could write confidently from London that “this plan you may be assured was devised by Lords North, Bute, and Jenkinson only.”30 A more general version of this view was that a Stuart-Tory party, the “corrupt, Frenchified party in the nation,” as it was described in 1766 — “evil-minded individuals,” Jonathan Mayhew believed, “not improbably in the interests of the houses of Bourbon and the Pretender” — was at work seeking to reverse the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. It was a similar notion that in all probability accounts for the republication of Rapin’s Dissertation on … the Whigs and Tories in Boston in 1773; and it was this notion that furnished Jefferson with his ultimate understanding of the “system” that sought to destroy liberty in America. Still another explanation, drawing no less directly on fears that had lain at the root of opposition ideology in England since the turn of the century, emphasized the greed of a “monied interest” created by the crown’s financial necessities and the power of a newly risen, arrogant, and irresponsible capitalist group, that battened on wars and stock manipulation. The creation of this group was accompanied “by levying of taxes, by a host of tax gatherers, and a long train of dependents of the crown. The practice grew into system, till at length the crown found means to break down those barriers which the constitution had assigned to each branch of the legislature, and effectually destroyed the independence of both Lords and Commons.”31

  The most common explanation, however — an explanation that rose from the deepest sources of British political culture, that was a part of the very structure of British political thought — located “the spring and cause of all the distresses and complaints of the people in England or in America” in “a kind of fourth power that the constitution knows nothing of, or has not provided against.” This “overruling arbitrary power, which absolutely controls the King, Lords, and Commons,” was composed, it was said, of the “ministers and favorites” of the King, who, in defiance of God and man alike, “extend their usurped authority infinitely too far,” and, throwing off the balance of the constitution, make their “despotic will” the authority of the nation.

  For their power and interest is so great that they can and do procure whatever laws they please, having (by power, interest, and the application of the people’s money to placemen and pensioners) the whole legislative authority at their command. So that it is plain (not to say a word of a particular reigning arbitrary Stuarchal power among them) that the rights of the people are ruined and destroyed by ministerial tyrannical authority, and thereby … become a kind of slaves to the ministers of state.

  This “junto of courtiers and state-jobbers,” these “court-locusts,” whispering in the royal ear, “instill in the King’s mind a divine right of authority to command his subjects” at the same time as they advance their “detestable scheme” by misinforming and misleading the people.32

  The notion that, as Eliot put it, “If the King can do no wrong, his ministers may; and when they do wrong, they ought to be h-g-d,” had served for generations in England to justify opposition to constituted government. It had been the standard argument of almost every opposition group from the earliest years of the eighteenth century, and it had been transmitted intact to the colonies, where now it received its final, apocalyptic application. Its expression in the writings of the seventies is legion. It was heard in inland towns, like Farmington, Connecticut, where in 1774 an assembly of 1,000 inhabitants resolved:

  That the present ministry, being instigated by the devil and led by their wicked and corrupt hearts, have a design to take away our liberties and properties, and to enslave us forever … That those pimps and parasites who dared to advise their masters to such detestable measures be held in utter abhorrence by … every American, and their names loaded with the curses of all succeeding generations.

  It was heard in the cities — in Philadelphia, where handbills addressed to tradesmen and mechanics warned that “a corrupt and prostituted ministry are pointing their destructive machines against the sacred liberties of the Americans, [attempting] … by every artifice to enslave the American colonies and plunder them of their property and, what is more, their birthright, liberty.” It was heard continuously in Boston, whose Committee of Correspondence condemned the Coercive Acts as “glaring evidence of a fixed plan of the British administration to bring the whole continent into the most humiliating bondage,” and whose Suffolk Resolves, addressed to the first Continental Congress, condemned “the arbitrary will of a licentious minister” and “the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America.” And it was heard in the Congress itself. The formal address of the first Continental Congress to the people of Great Britain dilated on “the ministerial plan for enslaving us.” The second Congress justified its actions by reference to “the rapid progress of a tyrannical ministry,” and explained in detail, in its plea for support from Canada, “the designs of an arbitrary ministry to extirpate the rights and liberties of all America,” arguing that armed resistance alone would induce the King at long last to “forbid a licent
ious ministry any longer to riot in the ruins of the rights of mankind.” It was this same protest against the “delusive pretenses, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities” of what Arthur Lee called “the most unprincipled administration that ever disgraced humanity” that shaped the Congress’ Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking up Arms and its more conciliatory Olive Branch Petition.33

  No fear, no accusation, had been more common in the history of opposition politics in eighteenth-century England; none was more familiar to Americans whose political awareness had been formed by the literature of English politics. It had, moreover, a special resonance in New England and elsewhere in the colonies where people generally were acquainted with the Biblical Book of Esther and hence had a special model for a ministerial conspiracy in the story of that “tyrannic bloodthirsty MINISTER OF STATE,” Haman, at the court of Ahasuerus. There he was, wrote the Newbury, Massachusetts, minister Oliver Noble in 1775, “Haman the Premier, and his junto of court favorites, flatterers, and dependents in the royal city, together with governors of provinces, councilors, boards of trade, commissioners and their creatures, officers and collectors of REVENUE, solicitors, assistants, searchers, and inspectors, down to tide-waiters and their scribes, and the good Lord knows whom and how many of them, together with the coachmen and servants of the whole…” — [footnote:] “Not that I am certain the Persian state had all these officers … or that the underofficers of state rode in coaches or chariots … But as the Persian monarchy was despotic … it is highly probable…” The story was so well known: “… now behold the DECREE obtained! The bloody PLAN ripened!” The “cruel perpetrators of the horrid PLOT and a banditti of ministerial tools through the provinces” had everything in readiness. “But behold! … A merciful GOD heard the cries of this oppressed people…” The parallels were closely drawn; Haman: Lord North; Esther and the Jews: the colonists; and Mordecai: Franklin.34

  But why were not these manipulators of prerogative satisfied with amassing power at home? Why the attention to faraway provinces in America? Several answers were offered, besides the general one that power naturally seeks to drive itself everywhere, into every pocket of freedom. One explanation was that the court, having reached a limit in the possibilities of patronage and spoils in the British Isles, sought a quarrel with the colonies as an excuse for confiscating their wealth. “The long and scandalous list of placemen and pensioners and the general profligacy and prodigality of the present reign exceed the annual supplies. England is drained by taxes, and Ireland impoverished to almost the last farthing … America was the only remaining spot to which their oppression and extortion had not fully reached, and they considered her as a fallow field from which a large income might be drawn.” When the colonists’ reaction to the Stamp Act proved that “raising a revenue in America quietly” was out of the question, it was decided to destroy their power to resist: the colonies were to be “politically broken up.” And so the Tea Act was passed, not to gain a revenue but, as in the case of the Massacre, to provoke a quarrel. The ministry wished “to see America in arms … because it furnished them with a pretense for declaring us rebels; and persons conquered under that character forfeit their all, be it where it will or what it will, to the crown.” England did not desire an accommodation of any sort, Lord North’s conciliatory plan notwithstanding. “From motives of political avarice,” she sought an excuse for conquest: “it is on this ground only that the continued obstinacy of her conduct can be accounted for.” Not that the crown was necessarily implicated. Most commentators, until 1776, considered the crown equally the victim of ministerial machinations, one writer reporting to London from Philadelphia late in 1774 that “it is suspected here that a design is regularly prosecuted by the ministry to make His Majesty dethrone himself by the calamities and convulsions his reign is likely to bring on his whole people. Please to inform me what is thought on this point in England.”35

  Perhaps the most explicit and detailed explanation of the assault upon America by a conspiratorial ministry, encapsulating a century of opposition thought, came from the pen of a country parson in Connecticut writing “to enlighten the people of a country town not under the best advantages for information from the newspapers and other pieces wrote upon the controversy.” Seeking to rouse the villagers “to a sense of the danger to which their liberties are now involved,” the Rev. Ebenezer Baldwin of Danbury explained that during the last war “the state of the colonies was much more attended to than it had been in times past,” and “a very exalted idea of the riches of this country” had been conveyed back to England by the returning officers and soldiers. This exciting information fitted the plans of the ministry neatly, for

  notwithstanding the excellency of the British constitution, if the ministry can secure a majority in Parliament who will come into all their measures [and] will vote as they bid them, they may rule as absolutely as they do in France or Spain, yea as in Turkey or India. And this seems to be the present plan: to secure a majority of Parliament, and thus enslave the nation with their own consent. The more places or pensions the ministry have in their gift the more easily they can bribe a majority of Parliament by bestowing those places on them or their friends. This makes them erect so many new and unnecessary offices in America, even so as to swallow up the whole of the revenue … by bestowing these places — places of considerable profit and no labor — upon the children or friends or dependents of the members of Parliament, the ministry can secure them in their interest. This doubtless is the great thing the ministry are driving at, to establish arbitrary government with the consent of Parliament. And to keep the people of England still, the first exertions of this power are upon the colonies.36

  Thus the balance of the constitution had been thrown off by a gluttonous ministry usurping the prerogatives of the crown and systematically corrupting the independence of the Commons. Corruption was at the heart of it — the political corruption built on the general dissoluteness of the populace, so familiar in the history of tyranny and so shocking to observers of mid-eighteenth-century England. The evil, public and private, that had appalled Dickinson in 1754 had ripened, it seemed clear, in the subsequent decade. As early as 1765 there had been nervous speculation in the colonies about what would happen

  if the British empire should have filled up the measure of its iniquity and become ripe for ruin; if a proud, arbitrary, selfish, and venal spirit of corruption should ever reign in the British court and diffuse itself through all ranks in the nation; if lucrative posts be multiplied without necessity, and pensioners multiplied without bounds; if the policy of governing be by bribery and corruption, and the trade and manufactures of the nation be disregarded and trampled under foot; if all offices be bought and sold at a high and extravagant price…; and if, to support these shocking enormities and corruptions, the subjects in all quarters must be hard squeezed with the iron arms of oppression.

  But the writer was still confident, as Franklin had been a decade earlier, that enough virtue remained in England to overcome the deepening corruption. Three years later, however, it was stated that

  The present involved state of the British nation, the rapacity and profuseness of many of her great men, the prodigious number of their dependents who want to be gratified with some office which may enable them to live lazily upon the labor of others, must convince us that we shall be taxed so long as we have a penny to pay, and that new offices will be constituted and new officers palmed upon us until the number is so great that we cannot by our constant labor and toil maintain any more.

  By 1769 a Boston correspondent of Wilkes commented on “that torrent of corruption which ‘like a general flood, has deluged all’ to the eternal disgrace of the British nation,” and suggested that the reason the “arbitrary and despotic” English government had “extended their ravages to America” was because they had found the British Isles too restricted an area for the full gratification of their “incessant cravings of luxury, extravagance and dissipati
on.” In 1770 Eliot wrote Hollis: “The Lord have mercy on Great Britain! for among the great, I fear, there is scarce a virtuous character to be found. I should be glad to hope it was better among the other ranks, but the people could not be sold if they did not first sell themselves.” Charles Carroll was even more emphatic: “I despair of seeing the constitution recover its former vigor. The vast influence of the crown, the luxury of the great, and the depravity of the common people are unsurmountable obstacles to Parliamentary independence … The English seem to be arrived to that degree of liberty and of servitude which Galba ascribes to the Roman people in his speech to Piso: imperaturus es hominibus, qui nec totam servitutem pati possunt, nec totam libertatem. Those same Romans, a few years after that period, deified the horse of Caligula.” Three years later, in 1774, he saw the same, ultimate degradation in England: “The insatiable avarice or worse ambition of corrupt ministers intent on spreading that corruption through America by which they govern absolutely in Great Britain, brought the British empire to the brink of ruin, armed (the expression is not too strong) subject against subject, the parent against the child, ready to add unnatural murders to the horrors of civil war.”37