The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  For the antifederalists, no less than the federalists, had a thoroughly realistic sense of human nature, and never deluded themselves that any people could be entirely virtuous or that any political population could be principally animated by public spirit. Patrick Henry, the most ardent of the antifederalist spokesmen, based his philosophy of government on the universal force and moral validity of what he called “self-love.” It is the heart of his most passionate and eloquent oration, which lasted for two days in the Virginia convention — a speech that must have been electrifying when Henry reached his peroration: “Must I give my soul, my lungs, to Congress? Congress must have our souls; the state must have our souls. This is dishonorable and disgraceful.”

  The devil in it all, he declared, was the implied powers of the “necessary and proper” clause combined with the innate evil of human nature. “Implication is dangerous because it is unbounded: if it be admitted at all, and no limits be prescribed, it admits of the utmost extension” because the lust for power, the passion for dominance, will exploit every possibility. Constitutional checks and balances cannot possibly eliminate or even effectively constrain the evil of human nature. The only counter-force that counts, Henry said, is “self-love.”

  Tell me not of checks on paper; but tell me of checks founded on self-love … fair, disinterested patriotism and professions of attachment to rectitude have never been solely trusted to by an enlightened, free people. If you depend on your President’s and Senators’ patriotism, you are gone … The real rock of political salvation is self-love, perpetuated from age to age in every human breast and manifested in every action. If they can stand the temptations of human nature, you are safe … there is no danger. But can this be expected from human nature? Without real checks, it will not suffice that some of them are good … the wicked will be continually watching: consequently you will be undone … I dread the depravity of human nature … I will never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.

  Britain’s freedom has survived, Henry concluded, not because of the people’s virtue but because the monarch’s “self-love, [his] self-interest,” coincides with the advancement of the nation’s prosperity. The monarch remains monarch for life, and his narrowest self-interest is therefore nourished by the nation’s successes and good fortune. But “the President and Senators have nothing to lose. They have not that interest in the preservation of the government that the kings and lords have in England. They will, therefore, be regardless of the interests of the people.”30

  Henry’s language was peculiarly his own, but his belief that “man is a fallen creature, a fallible being” was universal among the antifederalists. His colleague Mason, “considering the natural lust of power so inherent in man,” feared above all that “the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people.” In North Carolina, one antifederalist said “the depravity of mankind” militates against any confidence that the people’s representatives would have sufficient virtue and wisdom to regulate affairs properly, another that “it is the nature of mankind to be tyrannical” and hence he feared “the depravity of human nature, the predominant thirst for power which is in the breast of everyone.” And in New York the pseudonymous “Cato” wrote that “ambition and voluptuousness aided by flattery will teach magistrates … to have separate and distinct interests from the people,” a sentiment stated with even greater force by other antifederalists in that state, in Massachusetts, and in South Carolina.31

  It was because of their fear of human depravity, of mankind’s selfish neglect of the public good and passionate devotion to the narrowest self-interest, that the antifederalists were certain that an extended republic, of continental dimensions, could never survive as a free state and would end either as a military dictatorship or as a junta of ruthless aristocrats. The logic of this process was variously expounded, variously phrased, but the conclusion was everywhere the same and always derived from the same received tradition of pre-Revolutionary thought. For most, it was largely a matter of citing what “Brutus,” in the first of his notable series to the people of New York, called “the opinion of the greatest and wisest men who have ever thought or wrote on the science of government,” principally Montesquieu, whose classic formulation in The Spirit of the Laws he quoted:

  “It is natural to a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist. In a large republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation … he has interest of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy, great and glorious by oppressing his fellow citizens, and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country. In a large republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views … In a small one, the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses are of less extent, and of course are less protected.”

  A sentiment, “Brutus” said, concurred in by Beccaria, exemplified by Greek and Roman history, and simply self-evident. It was perfectly, palpably, logical. A free republic, he patiently explained, must be ruled by laws written by the representatives of the people.

  Now, in a large extended country it is impossible to have a representation possessing the sentiments … to declare the minds of the people without having it so numerous and unwieldly as to be subject in great measure to the inconveniency of a democratic government. The territory of the United States is of vast extent … Is it practicable for a country so large and so numerous as they will soon become to elect a representation that will speak their sentiments without their becoming so numerous as to be incapable of transacting public business? It certainly is not.

  And he went on to discourse on the varieties of climate, economic interests, religion, manners, and habits of the vast and scattered American population which might, he thought, one day far in the future, reach a total of 30 million souls.32

  Others developed variations on this basic theme. For “Cato,” who quoted the same passage of The Spirit of the Laws and cited the same examples from classical antiquity (examples helpfully furnished by Montesquieu), agreed with “Brutus,” but added that factionalism in an extended republic would lead inevitably to a standing army. For factionalism would produce the threat of secession, and that in turn would require the creation of “a permanent force, to be kept on foot” in order to preserve the state, a necessity created also by the difficulty of executing revenue laws, always the source of opposition to a government, “on the extremes” of the extended realm. Where a military force ruled, “will not political security, and even the opinion of it, be extinguished? Can mildness and moderation exist in a government where the primary incident in its exercise must be force? Will not violence destroy confidence…?” The “Federal Farmer” had more dramatic apprehensions. In a huge republic, the legislative body would be an uncontrollable mob, and the effectiveness of the sprawling court system would dissipate on the far-flung frontier, so that the rule of law would survive inversely with the distance from the seat of government. The result? “Either neglected laws, or a military execution of them … Neglected laws must first lead to anarchy and confusion; and a military execution of laws is only a shorter way to the same point — despotic government.” For James Winthrop the issue came down to the inevitable violation of local interests by a nation-state of continental size. And for George Mason it was simply a matter of recorded history. In the whole of history, he declared, “there never was a government over a very extensive country without destroying the liberties of the people … popular governments can only exist in small territories. Is there a single example on the face of the earth to support a contrary opinion?”33

  Upon all of this, rooted in fears formulated in the pre-Revolutionary past, the antifederalists mounted their assault on the Constitution. The newspapers teemed with their condemnations of a constitution that would legalize vast governmental powers, and failed even to include a bill of rights that might stand as a protector
of the individual liberties that had been won in the Revolution and that the national government was now being empowered to destroy. Nothing was more unaccountable to them than the absence of a bill of rights in a constitution known to be a design for a government potentially far more powerful than any the American people had ever known before. The federalists’ argument that all rights were reserved to the people because government would have only specified powers made little impression on them. Nor did the claim that if you enumerate rights you limit them to those you happen to list, or the argument that “parchment barriers,” a few words on a piece of paper, had never yet prevented anyone in authority from exercising undue power. The antifederalists continued to believe that government would, inevitably, infringe on personal rights, that if rights were not specified but simply assumed to exist, in the end it would be up to someone in government to say, in any given situation, what precisely the rights were that should be protected; and that would mean that those who controlled the government could constitutionally silence anyone who disagreed simply by refusing to recognize the rights they claimed.

  Did no one know history? Patrick Henry asked. Did no one recall that in Britain the people and the Crown had struggled for a century over the uncertainties of implied rights until the matter had finally been settled in the acceptance of an explicit bill of rights — and that that had been precisely the first thing that the American people had thought of when they were faced with the necessity of protecting themselves against Parliament’s power? Given the powers accorded the new national government in the Constitution, it was said time after time, unless there were a bill of rights,

  we are totally insecure in all of them; and no man can promise himself with any degree of certainty that his posterity will enjoy the inestimable blessings of liberty of conscience, of freedom of speech and of writing and publishing their thoughts on public matters, of trial by jury, of holding themselves, their houses and papers free from seizure and search upon general suspicion or general warrants; or in short that they will be secured in the enjoyment of life, liberty and property without depending on the will and pleasure of their rulers.

  The whole system, the “Federal Farmer” insisted — and with him almost every other antifederalist — should be “bottomed” on a bill of rights that declared the people’s “unalienable and fundamental rights” in such a way as to set limits to the power of government and to serve as an alarm when legislators and rulers overreached their proper bounds.34

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  Such was the challenge that faced the federalist leaders in the ratification struggle. Their task was complex. They had, first, to convince doubters that the existing situation under the Articles of Confederation was disastrous, verging on chaos, and that only a radical strengthening of the powers of the central government would solve the nation’s problems. They had, next, to explain the details of the proposed government and show how it met the current needs without destroying the liberties America had fought for, and without injuring local interests, at least in the long run. Somehow, too, they had to prove that in the mechanics of government the new nation-state would not absorb or otherwise destroy the state governments, which were seen as the protectors of the people’s liberties.

  But beyond all of that they had an overriding problem. They had to reach back into the sources of the received tradition, confront the ancient, traditional fears that had lain at the heart of the ideological origins of the Revolution, and identify and reexamine the ancient formulations that stood in the way of the present necessities: take these ideas and apprehensions apart and where necessary rephrase them, reinterpret them — not reject them in favor of a new paradigm, a new structure of thought, but reapply them and bring them up to date. They did not leave the cave, they corrected it. They would have been astonished to hear that they were initiating a change from something scholars would later call “civic humanism” or “classical republicanism” to another, something that would be called “liberalism,” or that they were chiefly interested in preserving patrician rule derived from the older tradition. They were neither more nor less determined to protect private property as a foundation of personal freedom and to advance economic enterprise than their predecessors and opponents, and they were no less committed to the need for disinterested “virtue” in government. Both they and their opponents were working within the broad pattern of political thought inherited from the early days of the Revolution, but the urgencies the federalists felt led them to reassess the impediments to the creation of a national state which they found embedded in that enveloping tradition.

  This could not easily be done. Aside from the intellectual demands of thinking through the ancient formulations, the task required imagination, boldness, freedom from fear. One of the most revealing themes that runs through the voluminous writings of the federalists is the exhortation to rise to the extraordinary occasion before them by thinking freshly and fearlessly about the problems they faced, and above all not to brood on groundless fears, not to view every change as the stroke of doom and imagine catastrophe around every corner. Catastrophe will be found everywhere, Timothy Pickering warned, “if we give a loose to our imaginations.” “Where in the name of common sense,” Hamilton wrote,

  are our fears to end if we may not trust our sons, our brothers, our neighbours, our fellow-citizens? What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits, and interests? … In reading many of the publications against the Constitution a man is apt to imagine that he is perusing some ill written tale or romance which, instead of natural and agreeable images, exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes — gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire — discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents and transforming every thing it touches into a monster.

  “Events merely possible,” Hamilton said on another occasion, “have been magnified by distempered imagination into inevitable realities, and the most distant and doubtful conjectures have been formed into a serious and infallible prediction.” Stop thinking in extremes, he warned; don’t abandon a wise government for “a fantastical Utopia.” And don’t argue “against a measure from a remote possibility of its being abused. Human sagacity cannot devise any law but what, in its operations, may in some instances bear hard.” But it was not easy to purge the antifederalists of what Judge Hanson called their “trumpery of fictions” and what Hamilton insisted was their hopeless infatuation with “halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age.” A mind like R. H. Lee’s, a writer in Virginia declared, “which delights … to indulge itself in political reveries, is capable of conceiving any idea, however absurd, and being startled by any danger, however visionary.” Madison, as always, spoke soberly and succinctly: “We must limit our apprehensions,” he said quietly in the Virginia debates, “to certain degrees of probability,” and then in a passage of what was for him extreme rhetoric, he sought to switch the role of the imagination from stirring up morbid fantasies of impending doom to assisting in the construction of “a government for posterity.” “Hearken not,” he wrote in one of the early Federalist papers,

  to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world … shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys … Is it not the glory of the people of America that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?

  … Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment, have been numbered among the melancholy
victims of misguided councils, must at best have been labouring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind.35

  It was with these injunctions in mind — to dismiss morbid fears of impending doom and to think ahead imaginatively but also realistically — that the federalists turned to the major problems their inheritance had created for them. Some of the problems were blatant, glaring. They were creating a national army, distinct from the state militias. But would these national troops not be, as the antifederalists claimed, the bloodthirsty, venal janissaries, the dreaded palace guards that Americans had been endlessly warned of and which they believed they had themselves confronted in the Revolutionary War? The question had to be answered.

  For Noah Webster, commissioned publicist of the federalist cause, the question was simply unreal: “the principles and habits of the Americans are directly opposed to standing armies; and there is as little necessity to guard against them by positive constitutions as to prohibit the establishment of the Mahometan religion.” Is Mahometanism prohibited in the state constitutions? No. And is Christianity in danger as a consequence? Do the states outlaw standing armies? No (with a couple of exceptions). And is civilian government in the states threatened by military coups d’état?

  But the venerable arguments could not simply be dismissed out of hand. The issue had to be carefully considered. All national, peacetime armies, Tench Coxe explained a month after the Constitution had been unveiled, are not “standing armies.” The American army would have no existence aside from the people’s will, since military appropriations were to last for only two years and to be made by the House of Representatives, “the immediate delegates of the people.” Further, the army would have no monopoly of military force. The state militias would not only “form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to overawe them” but will make a large national army unnecessary — which would be so in any case because of America’s “detached situation” geographically. Finally, he said, there is all the difference in the world “between the troops of such a commonwealth as ours, founded on equal and unalterable principles, and those of a regal government, where ambition and oppression are the profession of the king.” In a free state a military officer is simply “the occasional servant of the people, employed for their defence”; in a monarchy he is always the instrument of the schemes of oppression or conquest which obsess the mind of his royal master.36