The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

  All of this was part of the effort to come to terms with their inheritance. They felt the necessity to build a power center in the national government, but their inherited understanding of the dangers to liberty — fragile in its nature and easily destroyed — warned them against such an effort. At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that could dominate the nation.53 But that blueprint for a self-correcting power system, which they labored to explain in the minutest detail throughout the vast ratifying debate, was not enough. Something more was required. Their ideological inheritance, which so clearly warned them of the dangers of what they were doing and which fueled the antifederalists’ objections to the Constitution, had to be confronted and assessed. The past would have to be laid to rest; not rejected in favor of some other, different set of beliefs, but refined, renewed, brought up to date — worked out, fulfilled.

  Embarked as they were on a project they believed was without precedent in human history54 — to construct a potentially powerful state, but one that would preserve the liberties of the people — they clung to the basic ideology of the early Revolution but, where necessary, turned its monitory, negative formulations to affirmative purposes. Anachronisms were weeded out; irrelevancies in the American situation were discarded; distended abstractions were lanced and drained of distortions; and the hard realities of the real, functioning world were everywhere revealed. Change was inevitably involved, but the movement of change was return as well as departure: revision, refinement, and reapplication of an earlier tradition, not repudiation.

  So they dissipated the fear of “standing armies,” not by abandoning the fear of military rule but by showing the irrelevance of that peculiar and distinctive concept in the American situation. They recognized the need for a regular, professional army, but they insisted that it remain under strict civilian control: the military must always, Tench Coxe wrote in the course of his defense of a national army, “be regarded with a watchful eye, for it is a profession that is liable to dangerous perversion.”55 So they showed the irrelevance of the ancient “solecism” imperium in imperio; but despite Hamilton’s assurances and despite the federalist structure of the Constitution, they continued to believe that a concurrence of powers could mean a repugnancy; that in certain situations you could have — to repeat Madison’s words — “a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments,” and when you did you would find “violence in place of law, or the destructive coertion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coertion of the magistracy.” For, Madison prophetically insisted, “if a compleat supremacy some where is not necessary in every society, a controuling power at least is so, by which the general authority may be defended against encroachments of the subordinate authorities and by which the latter may be restrained from encroachments on each other.” The supremacy of Britain’s Parliament had not been necessary “for the harmony of that empire,” but the Crown’s negative “or some equivalent controul” had been necessary if “the unity of the system” were to have been preserved. The federalists did not dismiss the problem of dual sovereignties; they saw its deeper meanings, used it, and restated it.56

  Federalism was a possible, not a certain, solution; its essence was not automatic harmony but an uncertain tension which statecraft alone could maintain. For the federalists there was no other solution, since they, as much as the eloquent antifederalist “Brutus,” feared any comprehensive government whose power could be exercised without limitation. In their mind’s eye they too could imagine and they too shuddered at the thought of a national government that could creep into every corner of the country, “wait upon the ladies at their toilett … accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly … enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks … attend him to his bed-chamber, and watch him while he sleeps.” This they too, no less than their opponents, continued to believe was the ultimate tyranny.57

  So, similarly, the federalists tested for its practical reality the venerable abstraction that the peculiar distinction and animating principle of republics is somehow “virtue” — showed the ambiguities of such a schematic notion. But they never abandoned the belief that only an informed, alert, intelligent, and uncorrupted electorate would preserve the freedoms of a republican state, and that sufficient virtue existed to sustain the American republic. So too they scotched the fear of an effective national executive, showed its necessity and benignity in the American situation. But they continued to believe, as deeply as any of the militants of ’76, that power corrupts; that, in the words of the conservative Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, “the very idea of power included a possibility of doing harm”;58 that any release of the constraints on the executive — any executive — was an invitation to disaster; and that an unfettered collaboration between the executive and the military or the “secret services” was a certain catastrophe.

  It was thus that the federalists corrected the cave — enlarged its dimensions, reshaped it, modernized it. We live in that more spacious world. Thanks to them, and to their antifederalist opponents who helped keep them close to their ideological origins, we know what obstacles are there, and so may weave and flitter, dip and soar in perfect courses through the blackest air. In that spirit we too — in the very happiest intellection — may continue to correct the cave.

  1. The poem appeared first in Things of This World (1956) and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  2. See, besides the chapters above, Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, 1965–), I; idem, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, 1974), chaps. iii, vi; idem, Faces of Revolution (New York, 1990); idem, ed., “A Dialogue between an American and a European Englishman (1768),” Perspectives in American History, 9 (1975), 343–410.

  3. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), esp. parts 2 and 3.

  4. For a survey of some of the issues involved, concentrating on the uses made of the Revolution “as a rhetorical strategy” in the ratifying debate, each side attempting thereby to influence public opinion in its favor, see Frederick R. Black, “The American Revolution as ‘Yardstick’ in the Debates on the Constitution, 1787–1788,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117 (June 15, 1973), 162–185. In this Postscript I do not consider the debate on the Constitution as rhetoric, but as reality; I concentrate on the conceptual problems that framed the Founders’ understanding; and I stress the continuities in the basic ideology of the Revolution. For an excellent presentation of a similar view carried into the decade after the Constitution, see Lance Banning, “Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789–1793,” William and Mary Quarterly, 31 (April 1974), 167–188, and also Banning’s fuller treatment in his Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, 1978) and his careful updating of the issues in Reviews in American History, 17 (June 1989), 199–204.

  5. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution … (2d ed.; 4 vols., Washington, D.C., 1836); Paul L. Ford, ed., Essays on the Constitution of the United States … 1787–1788 (Brooklyn, 1892); idem, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States … 1787–1788 (Brooklyn, 1888); Walter H. Bennett, ed., Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican (University, Ala., 1978). Of the many reprintings of the complete Federalist papers, the edition by Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, 1961) is technically the most useful and will be the edition quoted in references to the last ten papers (LXXVI–LXXXV). Papers I–LXXV appear among the other commentaries on the Constitution so far published in the Docu
mentary History series cited in note 6 and will be quoted from that edition.

  6. Cecelia M. Kenyon, ed., The Antifederalists (Indianapolis, 1966); Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago, 1981); Merrill Jensen, John P. Kaminski, and Gaspare J, Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, 1976–). An essay in the front matter of the first volume reviews the earlier publishing history of the sources of the ratification controversy. Four volumes to date (XIII–XVI) of the series contain Commentaries on the Constitution, public and private, as distinct from the debates and other materials directly related to the ratifying conventions. These documents are numbered in a single sequence and will be referred to below as CC followed by the number in the sequence. Thus James Wilson’s speech of October 6, 1787, will be identified as such, followed by: Doc. Hist., XIII, CC 134.

  7. Knox to John Sullivan, New York, January 19, 1788, Doc. Hist., XV, CC 461.

  8. John P. Kaminski, “Antifederalism and the Perils of Homogenized History: A Review Essay,” Rhode Island History, 42 (1983), 35.

  9. Herbert J. Storing, “The ‘Other’ Federalist Papers: A Preliminary Sketch,” Political Science Reviewer, 6 (1976), 216–247.

  10. Washington to Hamilton, August 28, 1788, in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds., Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1961–1979), V, 207; Webster, review of The Federalist, quoted in Doc. Hist., XVI, 451n; “Marcus” [Iredell], IV, ibid., CC 616.

  11. For the text of Wilson’s speech and references to the controversy that followed, see ibid., XIII, CC 134.

  12. King to Jeremiah Wadsworth, New York, December 23, 1787, ibid., XV, CC 368; for Hanson’s comments, see ibid., pp. 521–522. Criticism like Hanson’s must have been widespread since the antifederalists thought it useful to develop it into an elaborate spoof. In a letter purportedly written in confidence by Benjamin Rush to Hamilton, Rush first congratulates Hamilton on their success in bribing the printers to suppress all antifederalist writings, and then adds: “I wish, Sir, I could prevail on Publius not to be so prolix; if his pieces were shorter, they would answer much better; besides, they want that spirit of declamation necessary to excite the public attention. Most people here say (and, I am sorry, with too much justice) that the pieces contain nothing but plagiarisms from history and British politics, and general sentiments that apply more forcibly against the constitution than for it. My dear sir, let me entreat you to have the plan changed.” Newport (R.I.) Mercury, March 24, 1788, p. 4. For other antifederalist abuse of the more heavy-handed Federalist papers which “would jade the brain of any poor sinner,” see Robert A. Rutland, “The First Great Newspaper Debate … 1787–88,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 97, part 1 (April 1987), 53, and Doc. Hist., XIII, 493n.

  The enormous importance accorded the Federalist papers is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon (though on the uses made of them in the antebellum period, see Rakove’s essay in Kessler, ed., Saving the Republic, cited fully below). Recognized now as this country’s most distinguished work of political theory, it provides abundant material for a large academic industry. The endless outpouring of scholarly writing on the series inundates everything written on the history of the Constitution and on American political thought. A complete bibliography would include hundreds, perhaps thousands, of items. These studies, growing ever more sophisticated, approach now an exquisite refinement of analysis that would have amazed the harried authors, who wrote polemically, to help win a political battle. Among the more notable studies are Morton White’s technical philosophical analysis, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (New York and Oxford, 1987); Daniel W. Howe’s psychological analysis, “The Political Psychology of The Federalist,” William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (July 1987); the fourteen essays in Charles R. Kesler, ed., Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding (New York and London, 1987); and David Epstein’s The Political Theory of the Federalist (Chicago, 1984).

  13. Ellsworth, speech in the Connecticut convention (January 7, 1788), Doc. Hist., III, 553 (the speech appears also in ibid., XV, CC 420, and in Elliot, Debates, II, 190–197); Wilson’s speeches in the Pennsylvania convention (December 1, 7, 1787), ibid., II, 450–451, 517. Stevens’ “Americanus” papers and the federalists’ struggle with the received tradition are discussed below, section 3. By the end of January 1788 the question of judicial review had become a prominent and controversial issue, as it had not been in the Philadelphia convention. The Supreme Court’s power to define “the sense of every article of the Constitution” and its freedom from “any fixed or established rules” or from correction by any superior power were savagely and brilliantly attacked — in words that would be repeated in every generation thereafter — by “Brutus” in seven of his sixteen essays published in New York, January 31–March 20, 1788. Ibid., XV, CC 489; XVI, CC 510, 530, 551, 576, 598, 632. (On the disputed authorship of the “Brutus” essays, see ibid., XIII, CC 178.) The Federalist’s replies, by Hamilton, who as a New York lawyer had earlier presumed the power of judicial review in arguing a case in that state’s courts, came late, in LXXVIII, LXXXI, and LXXXII (May 28, 1788), though Hamilton had anticipated some of his later arguments in XXII (December 14, 1787). “Americanus” too preceded The Federalist’s arguments in his clear and forceful statement of judicial review published on January 21 (paper VII, cited below, n. 43). For Hanson’s feeble responses to “Brutus,” in his Remarks on the Proposed Plan … (Annapolis, 1788), see Doc. Hist., XV, CC 490 (p. 536).

  14. Cecelia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” W.M.Q., 3d ser., 12 (1955), 3–43.

  15. Tredwell’s forceful speech, prepared for the July 2, 1788, session of the New York ratifying convention but apparently not delivered, appears in Elliot, Debates, II, 396–406, quotations at p. 401. For a similar interpretation of the antifederalists’ thought, in the context of the transit of generations, see Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (New York, 1980), pp. 282 ff.

  16. “A Columbian Patriot” [Mercy Otis Warren], Observations on the Constitution, in Doc. Hist., XVI, CC 581 (282, 283, 284, 276, 277). The genealogy of parties, linking present opponents to the enemies of ’76, could be argued on both sides. Thus a federalist squib in Pennsylvania identified seven characteristics shared by the anti-federalists and the Tories of ’76, among which were: denunciations of conventions and town meetings as mere mob actions; insistence that they, the antifederalists, alone understood the true principles of government; and harping on imaginary grievances. “It is to be hoped the Antifederalists will end their career as some of the Tories, whom they resemble in so many particulars, have done, viz. — in poverty — in exile.” Doc. Hist., II, 157.

  17. Luther Martin’s The Genuine Information is an expansion of his speech in the Maryland Assembly, November 29, 1787, justifying his behavior in the Philadelphia convention (Doc. Hist., XIV, CC 304B). The quotations from Bryan’s “Centinel” are from no. XII (Doc. Hist., XV, CC 470), where he explicitly defends his characterization of the federalists as “conspirators.” The term, he writes, “was not, as has been alledged, rashly or inconsiderately adopted; it is the language of dispassionate and deliberate reason, influenced by the purest patriotism. The consideration of the nature and construction of the new constitution naturally suggests the epithet; its justness is strikingly illustrated by the conduct of the patrons of this plan of government.” And he goes on to say — in a perfect paradigm of conspiratorial psychology — that if there had been any doubt that there was a conspiracy on foot the federalists’ “uneasiness” at the charge would clearly prove it: “innocence would have nothing to dread from such a stigma.” Bryan continued his “unmasking” of the federalists’ conspiracy in later numbers of the “Centinel.” The climax came with the attack on Franklin in no. XVII, where he declares himself finally satisfied that he has fully revealed the federalists’ “insidious design of enslaving and robbi
ng their fellow-citizens, of establishing those odious distinctions between the well born and the great body of the people, of degrading the latter to the level of slaves and elevating the former to the rank of nobility.” Doc. Hist., XVI, CC 642. For Rufus King and the Cincinnati, see ibid., p. 528. Cf. above, pp. 144–159.

  18. Conflated from “Philadelphiensis,” V, IX, XI (ibid., XV, CC 356; XVI, CC 507, 609).

  19. Ibid., XVI, 475.

  20. “Brutus,” VII, ibid., XV, CC 411. Henry’s speeches in the Virginia convention, Elliot. Debates, III, 56, 386. The former — June 5 — speech, printed, though with omissions, on pp. 43–64 of Elliot’s Debates, was one of Henry’s shorter orations, but it must have taken well over an hour to deliver. For the speech he delivered a short time later, which stretched over the better part of two days of the convention’s time, see pp. 137–176. On the national debt: “Brutus,” VIII, Doc. Hist., XV, CC 437.

  21. Mason’s remarks on federalism, which he amplified on various occasions, appear in Elliot, Debates, III, 29. “An Old Whig” [George Bryan?], VI, Doc. Hist., XIV, CC 292. For the earlier Tory denunciation of pre-Revolutionary dual-sovereignty notions, indistinguishable from the antifederalists’ attacks on the Constitution’s federalism, see above, pp. 219–223.

  22. “Brutus,” V, VI, continued in VII, Doc. Hist., XIV, CC 343; XV, CC 384 (the florid passage), and CC 411. Judge Hanson later commented on this peroration, calling it “the mere phrenzy of declamation, the ridiculous conjuration of spectres and hobgobblins!” Ibid., XV, CC 490A (545). Almost every leading antifederalist at one time or another elaborated on the impossibility of maintaining concurrent, federal powers for any length of time, and predicted that “the state governments must be annihilated, or continue to exist for no purpose.” E.g., “Federal Farmer,” II, Doc. Hist., XIV, CC 242, quotation at 29. So too did fence straddlers like Samuel Adams, unsure of what position to take and considering both sides carefully (Adams to R. H. Lee, December 3, 1787, ibid., CC 315). For other antifederalist endorsements of the old, and long since repudiated, belief that external and internal spheres of power could be effectively distinguished, see “An Old Whig,” VI, ibid., CC 292 (218); and “Brutus,” V, ibid., CC 343 (427). For Hamilton’s criticism of the idea, see Federalist XXX; for Wilson’s, arguing against William Findley’s invocation of the colonists’ arguments against Parliament’s efforts to impose “internal taxes or excises,” see his summation in the Pennsylvania convention, December 11, 1787, Doc. Hist., II, 557–558. Cf. above, pp. 212 ff.