The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  I am ravished and transported at the foresight of the American grandeur … Oh! how we shall shine with dukes in America! There will be no less than fifty-three of them … The Committees of Correspondence will furnish us with marquises; and the Committees of Observation, with earls. The viscounts may consist of heroes that are famed for their exploits in tarring and feathering; and the barons, or lowest order, of those whose merit has been signalized in burning such pamphlets as they were unable to answer.

  No one seriously proposed to create a new social basis for the middle level of government. But what would the result be? Republican states, of course. This in itself — in view of the Commonwealth derivation of some of the colonists’ most cherished ideas, in view also of the high esteem in which successful republics were held, and in view of the “genius of the Americans, their republican habits and sentiments” — was a matter, for most Americans, of satisfaction. But it was a matter also of concern, for while the condition of life in America and the moral qualities of the people made the creation of republics peculiarly feasible, other circumstances made their survival problematic.48

  Republics had always been known to be delicate polities, peculiarly susceptible to inner convulsions and outer pressures. And the larger the state the greater the danger. Monarchy, it was generally agreed, was best suited to extensive domains, popular government to small territories. The great and glorious republics of the past — “the ancient republics — Rome, Carthage, Athens, etc.,” and more recently Switzerland and Holland — had all been small in size compared with the united colonies, compared even with most of the individual states. Republican government “may do well enough for a single city or small territory, but would be utterly improper for such a continent as this. America is too unwieldy for the feeble, dilatory administration of democracy.”49

  “Democracy” — this was the point. “Republic” and “democracy” were words closely associated in the colonists’ minds; often they were used synonymously; and they evoked a mixed response of enthusiasm and foreboding. For if “republic” conjured up for many the positive features of the Commonwealth era and marked the triumph of virtue and reason, “democracy” — a word that denoted the lowest order of society as well as the form of government in which the commons ruled — was generally associated with the threat of civil disorder and the early assumption of power by a dictator.50 Throughout the colonial period, and increasingly in the early Revolutionary years, the dangers of “democratical despotism” preyed on the minds not merely of crown officials and other defenders of prerogative but of all enlightened thinkers: clerics like Andrew Eliot, who pointed out the “many inconveniencies which would attend frequent popular elections”; and lawyers like John Dickinson, who believed that “a people does not reform with moderation,” or like William Drayton, who stated forthrightly that he was as desirous of checking “the exuberances of popular liberty” as he was the excesses of prerogative. The leaders of the Revolutionary movement were radicals — but they were eighteenth-century radicals concerned, like the eighteenth-century English radicals, not with the need to recast the social order nor with the problems of economic inequality and the injustices of stratified societies but with the need to purify a corrupt constitution and fight off the apparent growth of prerogative power.51 To them it did not seem reasonable to “collect and assemble together the tailors and the cobblers and the ploughmen and the shepherds” of a vast domain and expect them to “treat and resolve about matters of the highest importance of state.” They would not know enough, they would not be skilled enough in government, they would not be sufficiently disinterested or independent of pressures to manage a government properly. Surely tradition and the lessons of history indicated that without an economically independent, educated, leisured order of society standing securely and permanently above the petty selfishness of multitudes of ordinary men scattered through half a continent, nothing would be expressed in government but “infinite diversity or particular interests [and] dissonant opinions”; and the result might well be chaos.52

  How then, in a society where “no distinction of ranks existed … and none were entitled to any rights but such as were common to all,” and where the government could by definition express only the will of “the democracy” could the liberty-saving balance be preserved? What, indeed, were the elements to be balanced, and by what organs of government should their interests be expressed?53 The discussion of these crucial questions — questions upon which the future character of public life in America would depend — began when the burning public issue was still the colonies’ relation to England and ended a decade or more later in the revisions of the first state constitutions. Between the two points was a continuous, unbroken line of intellectual development and political experience. It bridged two intellectual worlds: the mid-eighteenth-century world, still vitally concerned with a set of ideas derived ultimately from classical antiquity — from Aristotelian, Polybian, Machiavellian, and seventeenth-century English sources, and the quite different world of Madison and Tocqueville. Between the two was not so much a transition of ideas as a transformation of problems, the ultimate characteristics of which may be seen emerging indeliberately and unsurely in the passionate debate touched off by Paine’s Common Sense.

  For the intellectual core of that brilliant pamphlet advocating the independence of the colonies was its attack on the traditional conception of balance as a prerequisite for liberty. The assumption of the admirers of “the so much boasted constitution of England” that the balance of socio-constitutional forces was liberty-preserving, Paine proclaimed, was a fallacy. “The more simple anything is,” he argued, “the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” The constitution of England is “so exceedingly complex” that its evils can scarcely be diagnosed. What it consists of, really, is “the base remains of two ancient tyrannies” — “monarchical tyranny in the person of the King … [and] aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers” — thinly overlaid with “new republican materials in the persons of the commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.” The famous notion “that the constitution of England is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other is farcical,” and he proceeded to specify its emptiness and self-contradiction. What liberty there was in England was “wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government.” In America, where the character of the people was ideal for the attainment of liberty, institutions should be devised that conformed not to inherited prejudices and the accidents of history but to the true principles of human liberty. Let the American colonies cast off the chains that tie them to England and its corrupt monarchy, and as independent states create unicameral assemblies chosen annually by a “more equal” system of representation than heretofore and presided over by “a president only.” And let “a CONTINENTAL CHARTER or charter of the United Colonies (answering to what is called the Magna Carta of England)” be framed to provide for a unicameral assembly for the nation as well, selected by the same electorate and also presided over by a president, chosen from the various states in rotation. “But where, says some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”54

  It was a superbly rhetorical and iconoclastic pamphlet whose slashing attack upon the English monarchy — the one remaining link, in early 1776, between England and the colonies — and upon the concept of balance in the constitution made it an immediate sensation. But if Paine was with the exception of Marx “the most influential pamphleteer of all time,”55 he was also one of the most controversial. Common Sense had scarcely been published when it came under strong attack, not only by loyalists but by some of the most ardent patriots who feared the tendencies of Paine’s constitutional ideas as much as they approved his plea for Independence.

  The Tories’ attack began with James Chalmers’ ponderous Plain Truth, which condemned Paine�
��s views of society and human nature, and defended the English constitution “which with all its imperfections is, and ever will be, the pride and envy of mankind.” All the well-known elements of “this beautiful system” were necessary for freedom: without the crown “our constitution would immediately degenerate into democracy” — a plausible enough kind of state no doubt, but one much favored by demagogues who well know that it, above all other forms of government, was susceptible to absolute corruption. “If we examine the republics of Greece and Rome, we ever find them in a state of war, domestic or foreign.” Holland, which survived only because of England’s support, had participated “in wars the most expensive and bloody ever waged by mankind.” Even Switzerland had fared badly: its “bleak and barren mountains” had not preserved its constitution from assault by “ambition, sedition, and anarchy.” The “quixotic system” of government proposed by Paine was “really an insult to our understanding” and would soon give way “to government imposed on us by some Cromwell of our armies,” for when popular legislatures presumed to create armies they soon became their victims, unless like Holland they somehow managed “to drown [their] garrisons.” Even if dictatorship were avoided, Paine’s Congress would become the center of controversies that would conclude in “all the misery of anarchy and intestine war.”56

  A more sophisticated Tory attack on Paine’s constitutional ideas, Charles Inglis’ True Interest of America, was less influential since the entire first printing of the pamphlet was destroyed by a Whig mob; by the time a new edition was prepared independence had been declared and the pamphlet was largely ignored. Yet it is in some ways more revealing than Plain Truth, for while Inglis too could fulminate and fume, he understood Paine thoroughly, and analyzed with notable clarity the logic and evidence of his views. In the end Inglis endorsed the traditional idea that monarchy alone is suited to the government of an extensive domain and that popular governments can survive only in small territories where the inhabitants form a homogeneous community with a unified economic interest.57

  Paine’s most influential opponents, however, were not Tories but those who agreed with him on the question of independence but who disagreed with his constitutional proposals. John Adams, who distrusted him from the instant he laid eyes on him (or so he said in later years) and called him “a star of disaster” whose constitutional ideas flowed either from “honest ignorance or foolish superstition on one hand or from willful sophistry and knavish hypocrisy on the other,” denounced Paine’s advocacy of unicameral assemblies in both states and nation, and, fearing the effect “so popular a pamphlet might have among the people,” set about to put things right.

  What bothered Adams most about Common Sense was that its plan of government “was so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” The premise of his own plan, sketched in his Thoughts on Government, which circulated among the constitution-makers of several states in manuscript in the spring of 1776, was that it was possible to devise republican governments, by definition lacking the first and second orders of society, with inner balances as effective as those of a mixed monarchy. It was possible because a republic was, by proper definition, only “an empire of laws, and not of men,” and this permitted “an inexhaustible variety” of institutional forms “because the possible combinations of the powers of society are capable of innumerable variations.” In an extensive country, direct assembly of the whole population was out of the question, and so the first step was “to depute power from the many to a few of the most wise and good” who should form in their assembly “an exact portrait of the people at large … equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it.” Yet however representative of the interests of society this single assembly might be, it should not be given control of all the branches of government, for it was the nature of popular assemblies to be fickle, “productive of hasty results and absurd judgments,” avaricious, and ambitious. Difficult for the electorate to control, an unchecked representative assembly would quickly make itself permanent, exempt itself from the burdens it laid on its constituents, and pass and execute laws for its own benefit. And in any case popular assemblies were unsuited to exercise certain of the powers of government: they were too open and inefficient to act as an executive, and too slow in procedure and ignorant of the law to act as a judiciary. The organization of government “ought to be more complex” than a single unicameral assembly. Even separating the executive from the legislative power and placing it in the hands of an organ of government other than the assembly would not be sufficient, for “these two powers will oppose and enervate upon each other until the contest shall end in war.” There would have to be also an additional assembly “as a mediator between these two extreme branches.” Chosen by the representative assembly, it “should have a free and independent exercise of its judgment, and consequently a negative voice in the legislature.” Let the two houses together choose annually an executive capable of exercising independent judgment to the extent of vetoing acts of the legislature. Distinct from all of this should be the judiciary, composed of men of learning, legal experience, and wisdom. “Their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests,” and they should be guaranteed independence by life tenures. Such a republican system, expressing but yet controlling and refining the will of the people, would create an “arcadia or elysium” compared with all other governments “whether monarchical or aristocratical.”58

  The proposal was necessarily conjectural — alternative possibilities were suggested throughout — and it was crowded with ambiguities and paradoxes. What was there in the character of the middle branch — the second assembly — that distinguished its members from the population in general? What did it represent? How could it retain its independence if it were elected annually by a body extremely sensitive to public opinion? Its similarities to the middle bodies of other governments were superficial, for it could not be thought of as embodying a separate order or interest in a society that consisted of only one order. And it could not constitute a distinct function of government, for those — the legislative, executive, and judicial — were otherwise provided for. What was clear throughout, however, was that Adams was seeking to perpetuate that “balance between … contending powers” that had been the glory of England’s uncorrupted constitution.

  The point was widely endorsed, and in other pamphlets of 1776 more fully explored. In Virginia, Adams’ pamphlet arrived amid the “welter of proposed drafts of constitutions” then before the legislature, and it elicited a mixed reaction. Patrick Henry gave it his highest accolade by saying that its ideas were “precisely the same [as those] I have long since taken up,” and wrote that he hoped it would help influence those “opulent families” known to be working for the establishment of aristocratic rather than republican forms of government. What precisely these counter-revolutionary anti-republicans had in mind, and the extent of their agreement with Adams on the key point of the anomalous middle chamber, was made clear in what Henry called a “silly thing” and Richard Henry Lee described as a “contemptible little tract,” Carter Braxton’s Address to the Convention of … Virginia, written for the specific purpose of refuting Adams’ Thoughts on Government.

  Braxton’s “anti-republicanism,” it developed, was the result of his effort to recreate artificially the traditional socio-constitutional basis of governmental balance. The present tyranny of the British government, he wrote, is not as Paine had said, intrinsic to its structure but the result of “a monied interest” having usurped the power of the crown and destroyed “those barriers which the constitution had assigned to each branch” of the government. Let not the whole be condemned for the momentary corruption of a part. Let Virginia, in principle at least, “adopt and perfect that system which England has suffered to be so grossly abused and the experience of the ages has taught us to venerate.” Restore the independence of the branches lost in England. Let t
here be a popular assembly from which the blood-sucking adherents of the moneyed interests would be excluded and the system of representation made “equal and adequate” so that the prerogative would not be able to corrupt it. Let the house of representatives choose a governor to serve for life and a council of state to constitute “a distinct or intermediate branch of the legislature, and hold their places for life in order that they might possess all the weight, stability, and dignity due to the importance of their office” as well as the time and means for the reflective study of policies and laws. Only such an independent, superior “second branch of the legislature” would be able to “mediate and adjust” the differences that might arise between the governor and the house, “investigate the propriety of laws, and often propose such as may be of public utility.” Such a government might have certain failings, but it would at least avoid the evils of popular governments, “fraught with all the tumult and riot incident to simple democracy,” that some were now advocating. “Democratical” governments have rarely succeeded, for the mass of the people have only rarely had the power of self-denial, the disdain of riches, of luxury, and of dominance over others necessary to sustain such governments. They have survived only in small countries “so sterile by nature” that men, of necessity equally poor, had no temptation to seek and use power in defense of their interests. The very promise of life in America argued against the stability of democratic governments.59

  Others in Virginia, including some of those who were striving deliberately to establish a government “very much of the democratic kind,” agreed that a “second branch of legislation” was necessary, though they differed in the degree to which they conceived of this branch as a function of government rather than as an embodiment of a social order. Jefferson, whose draft constitution for his state was a far more “radical departure” than could possibly be accepted, not only provided for a “senate” but so devised the election of its members that they would be, once chosen, “perfectly independent of their electors”; and though he felt that his device — election of the senators by the representatives for a nonrenewable term of nine years — would provide the necessary independence, he said that he “could submit, though not so willingly, to an appointment [of senators] for life or to anything rather than a mere creation by and dependence on the people.” And the plan George Mason prepared for the state’s official drafting committee provided for the election of the upper house not by the people but by a separate group of specifically elected “deputies or sub-electors” whose sole function it would be to choose members of the upper house from among those possessing “an estate of inheritance of lands in Virginia of at least two thousand pounds value.”60