The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  30. Allen, American Alarm (JHL 39), 1st sec., pp. 18–19 (cf. the same author’s reference to “Scotch-barbarian troops” at the St. George’s Fields riot, in Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty [JHL 38], p. xiii); Arthur Lee Papers (MSS in Houghton Library, Harvard University), I, 2; II, 26, 33; Eliot to Hollis, December 25, 1769, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 445.

  31. [Stephen Johnson], Some Important Observations … (Newport, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 19), p. 15; Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken … (Boston, 1766: JHL Pamphlet 20), p. 9; [Carter Braxton], An Address to … Virginia; on the Subject of Government … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 66), p. 10. Jefferson’s explanation appeared first as notes he jotted down on reading François Soulé’s Histoire des troubles de l’Amérique anglaise (London, 1785) at the point where George III’s education is mentioned: “The education of the present King was Tory. He gave decisive victories to the Tories. To these were added sundry rich persons sprung up in the E. I. America would have been too formidable a weight in the scale of the Whigs. It was necessary therefore to reduce them by force to concur with the Tories.” Later he wrote more formally to Soulé: “The seeds of the war are here traced to their true source. The Tory education of the King was the first preparation for that change in the British government which that party never ceases to wish. This naturally ensured Tory administrations during his life. At the moment he came to the throne and cleared his hands of his enemies by the peace of Paris, the assumptions of unwarrantable right over America commenced; they were so signal, and followed one another so close as to prove they were part of a system either to reduce it under absolute subjection and thereby make it an instrument for attempts on Britain itself, or to sever it from Britain so that it might not be a weight in the Whig scale. This latter alternative however was not considered as the one which would take place. They knew so little of America that they thought it unable to encounter the little finger of Great Britain.” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Julian P. Boyd, ed., Princeton, 1950–), X, 373n2, 369.

  32. Allen, American Alarm (JHL 39), 1st sec., pp. 8–9; Noble, Some Strictures (JHL 58), p. 6; Allen, Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty (JHL 38), p. 29.

  33. Eliot to Hollis, December 25, 1769, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 446; Gipson, British Empire, XII, 173, 91, 150n, 245, 255, 326, 328; Boyd, Jefferson Papers, I, 220, 214; Lee Papers, II, 62.

  34. Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford, 1964), pp. 37–38, 51, 53–54, 147–148, 170, 291, 318–319; Noble, Some Strictures (JHL 58), pp. 10, 17–18, 12. See also Richard Salter, A Sermon … (New London, 1768); Johnson, Some Important Observations (JHL 19), pp. 39, 55–56; Elisha Fish, Joy and Gladness … (Providence, 1767). For an earlier use of this Biblical imagery, see Philip Livingston’s angry description in 1747 of Cadwallader Colden as New York’s “Haman,” quoted by Milton Klein in W.M.Q., 3d ser., 17 (1960), 445.

  35. Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 69), p. 5; [John Dickinson?] to Arthur Lee, October 27, 1774, Lee Papers, II, 26. For the argument that the Massacre was a deliberate effort of the enemies of Massachusetts “to drive it into that state [of rebellion], whereby in the end they might hope to gratify both their malice and avarice,” see Bowdoin, et al., Short Narrative, p. 44 (cf. p. A:86).

  36. Baldwin, Appendix (JHL 52), pp. 51, 67–68.

  37. Johnson, Some Important Observations (JHL 19), p. 20; Thomas Bradbury, The Ass, or, the Serpent … (1712: reprinted in Boston, 1768), p. 12n; William Palfrey to Wilkes, February 21 and April 12, 1769, MHS Procs., 47 (1913–14), 197, 199; Eliot to Hollis, June 28, 1770, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 453; Carroll to Edmund Jennings and to William Graves, August 9, 1771, August 15, 1774. in Maryland Historical Magazine, 32 (1937), 197, 225. The Latin quotation is from Tacitus, Histories, I, xvi; it was translated in Cato’s Letters, no. 41 (which reprints the whole of Galba’s speech, after a discursive introduction), as: “You are about to govern the Romans, a people of too little virtue to support complete liberty, of too much spirit to bear absolute bondage.”

  38. [Matthew Robinson-Morris, Lord Rokeby], Considerations on the Measures Carrying on with Respect to the British Colonies in North America (2d ed., London, 1774), p. 10. This pamphlet was reprinted three times in Boston, twice in Philadelphia, and once in New York and Hartford in 1774 and 1775. For Abigail Adams’ awareness of the identity between Rokeby’s views and those of her husband writing as “Novanglus,” see her letter of May 22, 1775, in L. H. Butterfield, et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, 1963), I, 202, 203n11. See also [Joseph Priestley], An Address to Protestant Dissenters (Boston, 1774), p. 6; this pamphlet, first published in London in 1773, appeared in three American editions in 1774. And see, in general, Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, “James Burgh and American Revolutionary Theory,” MHS Procs., 73 (1961), 38–57; H. Trevor Colbourn, “John Dickinson, Historical Revolutionary,” Pa. Mag., 83 (1959), 284; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, 1959), chap. ix.

  39. The first of Bollan’s pamphlets of 1768 is An Epistle from Timolean…; for an indication of the curious complication of Bollan’s reputation in Massachusetts, see Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 721–722. Strahan to Hall, February 23, 1763; February 13 and March 12, 1768, in Pa. Mag., 10 (1886), 89, 329, 333. (For the publisher Edmund Dilly’s similar fear of “bribery and corruption … swarms of placemen and pensioners … [which] like leeches suck the very vitals … of the constitution,” see ibid., 83 [1959], 284.) The Rockingham and Chatham speeches are in T. C. Hansard, The Parliamentary History of England … (London, 1806–1820), XVI, 742, 747, 752.

  40. Adams (“Novanglus”), Works, IV, 31, 28, 54–55; William Hooper to James Iredell, April 26, 1774, in W. L. Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C., 1886–1890), IX, 985–986; William H. Drayton, A Charge on the Rise of the American Empire … (Charleston, 1776), pp. 2–3; Seabury, A View, in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, p. 140; Albert H. Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VI, 311–312; Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress (Washington, D. C., 1921–1938), I, 53, 54. Analogies to the decline and fall of Rome sprang to the lips of almost every commentator as the crisis in Anglo-American affairs deepened; Arthur Lee’s “Monitor” letters, for example — to pick almost at random — are replete with such references (see especially no. II, Virginia Gazette [R], March 3, 1768), as are the letters of Charles Carroll. Adams’ quotation of Jugurtha’s description of Roman venality is from Sallust, War with Jugurtha, xxxv, 12–13. Sallust was an invaluable treasury of apothegms and warnings on the consequences of public corruption; it was this theme in Sallust that Thomas Gordon had exploited most fully in the introductory Discourses to his popular translation (1744); note especially Discourse VI. The sentence Adams quotes as of Jugurtha was perhaps Sallust’s most memorable phrase for the eighteenth century. It had appeared in Cato’s Letters (no. 18), and it had been used by Americans to describe England at least as early as 1754 (see Dickinson’s letter quoted above, p. 90); it continued to be used throughout the pre-Revolutionary years. Hooper’s letter contains a particularly elaborate discussion of Britain, corruption, and the fall of Rome; in it Rome as observed by Jugurtha and England since Walpole are explicitly compared.

  41. Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country … (Salem, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 55), pp. 21, 22, 23, 25, 26. Cf., e.g., Thomas Coombe, A Sermon Preached … (Philadelphia, 1775), pp. 19–20; [Richard Wells], A Few Political Reflections … (Philadelphia, 1774), pp. 38–40, 50.

  42. Adams, Dissertation, in Works, III, 452n; Mayhew, Snare Broken (JHL 20), pp. 36, 38. The concept of America as a refuge for liberty was by no means an exclusively American notion. As early as 1735 James Thomson had celebrated the idea in his book-length poem Liberty (the relevant passage is quoted, and the secondary literature cited, in Bailyn, Pamphlets, I, 730). The idea that liberty was drifting steadily westward was commonly accepted; Thomas Pownall invoked the noti
on explicitly in the opening section of his Administration of the Colonies: he had long assumed, he wrote, “from the spirit and genius of the people” that the colonies would “become in some future and perhaps not very distant age an asylum to that liberty of mankind which, as it hath been driven by corruption and the consequent tyranny of government, hath been constantly retiring westward” (4th ed., 1768, pp. 44–45). Beyond these specific references to America was the more abstract and general notion that overseas territories were the natural sanctuaries for liberty and virtue bedeviled by domestic corruption and authoritarianism. See, e.g., Andrew Eliot’s confession of his thrill in reading of the regicide “honest General [Edmund] Ludlow’s account of the generous protection afforded him by the magistrates of Berne, and felt a secret pleasure in the thought that there was such a land of liberty to be an asylum to patriots and virtue in distress.” To Hollis, January 29, 1769, MHS Colls., 4th ser., IV, 436.

  43. Rokeby, Considerations, p. 148; Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing under Calamities and Afflictions … (New York, 1776), p. 38; Hooper to Iredell, cited in note 40 above, pp. 985, 986.

  44. Johnson, Some Important Observations (JHL 19), pp. 21, 23; [Robert Carter Nicholas], Considerations on the Present State of Virginia Examined ([Williamsburg], 1774), in the Earl G. Swem edition (New York, 1919), pp. 68, 42.

  45. Braxton, Address (JHL 66), p. 19; Seabury, A View, in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, pp. 12, 117; [Daniel Leonard] (“Massachusettensis”), The Origin of the American Contest with Great-Britain … (New York, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 56), p. 84; [Joseph Galloway], A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great-Britain and the Colonies … (New York, 1775), p. 31; [Thomas Paine], Common Sense … (Philadelphia, 1776: JHL Pamphlet 63), pp. [ii], 30, 60.

  A NOTE ON CONSPIRACY

  As I have indicated at length in Chapters III and IV, the conviction on the part of the Revolutionary leaders that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the balance of the constitution and eliminate their freedom had deep and widespread roots — roots elaborately embedded in Anglo-American political culture. How far back in time one may trace these roots it is difficult to say, but I have attempted at least to illustrate in the pages above, and to show in considerable detail elsewhere,1 that the configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual Revolution, and that among the dominant elements in this pattern were the fear of corruption — of its anticonstitutional destructiveness — and of the menace of a ministerial conspiracy. At the very first signs of conflict between the colonies and the administration in the early 1760’s the question of motivation was openly broached and the imputation of secret purposes discussed. Early in the controversy anti-administration leaders like Oxenbridge Thacher could only “suppose” for the sake of discussion “that no design is formed to enslave them,” while pro-administration partisans, like Martin Howard, Jr., were forced to refute the charge of design.2 To be sure, the conviction that the colonies, and England itself, were faced with a deliberate, anti-libertarian design grew most quickly where the polarization of politics was most extreme and where radical leaders were least inhibited in expressing and reinforcing general apprehensions. But in some degree it was present everywhere; it was almost universally shared by sympathizers of the American cause. The views of John Dickinson are particularly interesting, not merely because, though the most cautious and reluctant of Revolutionary leaders, he so forcefully conveyed the idea of conspiracy, but because he understood so well the psychological and political effects of thinking in precisely these conspiratorial terms. Reviewing the crisis of Charles I’s reign, he pointed out that

  acts that might by themselves have been upon many considerations excused or extenuated derived a contagious malignancy and odium from other acts with which they were connected. They were not regarded according to the simple force of each but as parts of a system of oppression. Every one, therefore, however small in itself, became alarming as an additional evidence of tyrannical designs. It was in vain for prudent and moderate men to insist that there was no necessity to abolish royalty. Nothing less than the utter destruction of the monarchy could satisfy those who had suffered and thought they had reason to believe they always should suffer under it. The consequences of these mutual distrusts are well known.3

  The explosion of long-smoldering fears of ministerial conspiracy was by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. It was experienced in England too, in a variety of ways, by a wide range of the English political public. Under George III, George Rudé has pointed out, it was

  widely believed … that the influence of the Crown was being used to staff the administration with new Favourites and “King’s Friends,” who formed a secret Closet party, beyond the control of Parliament and guided behind the scenes by the sinister combination of the Earl of Bute (who had resigned office in 1763) and the Princess Dowager of Wales. Opponents of the new system talked darkly of a repetition of “the end of Charles II’s reign” — and such talk was not confined to the circles of the Duke of Newcastle and others, who might be inclined to identify the eclipse of their own public authority with that of the national interest.

  Such expressions, Rudé concludes, “were common currency and abound throughout this period both in the press, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), in personal correspondence, pamphlet literature and speeches in Parliament.”4 Burke’s Thoughts is particularly relevant to the American situation, for the apprehension that dominates that piece is in essence interchangeable with that of innumerable Revolutionary writers. Its argument that Parliament was on the brink of falling “under the control of an unscrupulous gang of would-be despots” who would destroy the constitution “was sufficiently widely believed,” Ian Christie has written, “to give momentum in due course to a radical movement in the metropolis.”5 The specific identification in Thoughts of the conspiratorial cabal at work was distinctively Burke’s, but those who most vehemently disagreed with him about the source and nature of the conspiracy were no less convinced that a conspiratorial cabal of some sort was in fact at work. Catharine Macaulay, speaking for the extreme radicals, found it in the “maneuvers of aristocratic faction and party” of which Burke and the Rockinghams were themselves the inheritors and which was based on “a system of corruption [that] began at the very period of the [Glorious] Revolution and … was the policy of every succeeding administration.” Horace Walpole too felt that Burke had not gone back far enough: “The canker had begun in the administration of the Pelhams,” in the effort of the clique around the Princess Dowager “to inspire arbitrary principles into her son [the future George III] and to instruct him how to … establish a despotism that may end in tyranny in his descendants.”6

  For Horace Walpole, therefore, the immediate villain was Bute, who had arrived on the scene, Walpole wrote, with the triple disability of being “unknown, ungracious, and a Scot”; his influence, it was believed, continued through the sixties unabated, and by the early 1770’s “Lord North had flung himself into the hands of Lord Bute’s junto.” In believing this, Walpole was scarcely alone. The conviction that Bute’s secret influence lay behind the troubles of the time was widespread in opposition circles in England as it was in America. Seven years after Bute left office, Chatham delivered a speech in the Lords against “the secret influence of an invisible power — of a favorite, whose pernicious counsels had occasioned all the present unhappiness and disturbances in the nation, and who, notwithstanding he was abroad, was at this moment as potent as ever.” Rockingham, who was convinced that Bute’s secret influence had destroyed his administration in 1765–66, wrote in 1767 that his party’s “fundamental principle” was to resist and restrain “the power and influence of Lord Bute.” More ordinary opinion was reflected by the printer and publicist William Strahan, who in fact thought well of Bute but who agreed that his secret influence remained paramount long after his resignation fr
om office. Strahan’s colleague in the press, John Almon, not only blamed the evils of the time on Bute but believed that the Rockinghams were secretly cooperating with him. Indeed, the image of Bute as a malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator was almost universal among the opposition. Propagated endlessly in pamphlets and newssheets of all sorts, caricatured in a torrent of lurid cartoons depicting “‘the thane’ as the lover of the Princess Dowager of Wales … and thus the bestower of posts and pensions to hordes of hungry barbarous Scots to the exclusion of the English,” the idea of Bute as the central plotter became one of the keystones in the structure of opposition ideology, and it contributed forcefully to the belief, in England as well as in America, that an active conspiracy against the constitution was underway.7

  Not everyone, of course, even within opposition circles, agreed that there was a deliberate design to overthrow the balance of the constitution; fewer still agreed with the republican radicals that the Coercive Acts were intended to “enslave America; and the same minister who means to enslave them would, if he had an opportunity, enslave England.” Yet Lord Dartmouth felt it necessary to refute that charge specifically, and while it is true, as Christie has explained, that “abundant evidence now available about the activities of court and government enables historians to dismiss this fear as a chimera,” it is nevertheless also true that there was a “contemporary belief in such a threat,” a belief that was associated with the American crisis and that proved to be “a powerful stimulus to demands for reform” in English domestic affairs. “The sophisticated members of political society rightly dismissed as rubbish the misconceived but genuine radical fear, that the triumph of British arms and authority in America would be followed by the extinction of British liberties at home,” but the fear remained, widespread enough, powerful enough, to force disbelievers to acknowledge it and to confront it. Thus the cool, well-informed, and hard-headed Dr. John Fothergill, the secret negotiator between Franklin and Dartmouth in the winter of 1774–75, felt it necessary to explain that he did “not quite” credit the ministry with “endeavoring to enslave [the colonists] by system. I believe they are very happy if they can find expedients for the present moment.” So too Strahan wrote rather desperately to his American correspondent that “I know the good disposition of the ministry towards you … I know there is no disposition, either in the King, the ministry, or the Parliament, to oppress America in any shape.”8