by Peter Watson
Thomas Paine had three careers, one in England, one America and one in France. Though he was not an easy man, or easy to classify, his abilities and his passion (even his fanaticism) were everywhere recognised and he made distinguished friends wherever he went–Franklin in America, Priestley in England, Condorcet in France. A true radical, who loved nothing so much as making trouble, he was at the same time a brilliant writer, a genius at making complex issues simple. ‘He overflowed with aphorisms as Mozart overflowed with melodies.’42 Perhaps because he was not especially well-educated, he simplified the leading ideas of the Enlightenment in a form that produced a large response. He argued that the laws of nature which regulated ‘the great machine and structure of the universe’ implied natural rights. The logic of this led him to favour revolution and, to his satisfaction, he did indeed witness revolution in two of the three countries where he lived.
Unlike many philosophes, Paine was no academic, or aesthetician. He was interested above all in practical progress. He urgently wanted an improvement in the material conditions of the underprivileged and a more egalitarian distribution of resources.43 Part Two of The Rights of Man has as its subtitle ‘Combining principle and practice’. Thus he was an early critic of slavery and derived much satisfaction by writing the preamble to the Pennsylvania Act which prohibited slavery in that commonwealth. In his other writings, particularly Common Sense (1776), which despite ‘not being profound’ sold 120,000 copies, he urged progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes which were to be used to finance schemes for social welfare.44 He also wanted the young to be given bonuses so they would have a good start in married life. And he advocated free schooling for the children of the poor, and financial and material support for the unemployed. ‘Thomas Paine was a world figure but it was America that made him. It was in America that he found his mission in life. It was to America that he returned in the end, after both England and France rejected him. It was on America, too, that his hopes were centred. Everywhere in the Old World “antiquity and bad habits” supported tyranny…America was the only spot in the political world where the principles of universal reformation could begin.’45
Each of these men was remarkable and America could count herself lucky to have them. In time, as we shall see, they put together the best ideas of the Enlightenment to create–in the form of the American constitution–a new way of living together which was to prove as convincingly as anything ever is convincing that freedom and equality and prosperity are intimately linked and mutually supporting. Their first task, however, which went hand-in-hand with the creation of the first universities, the early hospitals and the first forays into scholarship, was to change some of the bad and/or mistaken impressions that many condescending Europeans clung on to. In retrospect, the way that life in America had advanced in the early years had beaten all expectations.
Thomas Jefferson himself was the most powerful and passionate advocate of America.46 For example, his answer to the charge that nature was sterile and emaciated in the New World was to point to Pennsylvania, ‘a veritable garden of Eden, with its streams swarming with fish, its meadows with hundreds of song birds’. How could the soil of the New World be so thin when ‘all Europe comes to us for corn and tobacco and rice–every American dines better than most of the nobles of Europe’. How could the American climate be so enervating when statistical tables showed a higher rainfall in London and Paris than in Boston and Philadelphia?47
In 1780 a young French diplomat, the marquis de Barbé-Marbois, had the idea to canvas opinion from several governors of American states and sent them a series of questions about the organisation and resources of their respective commonwealths. Jefferson’s response was the most detailed, the most eloquent and by far the most famous–Notes on Virginia. There is something surreal about this book now but the issues it attacked were keenly felt at the time. Jefferson met Buffon and the European sceptics head on. He compared the work rates of Europeans and Americans, as defined by actuarial statistics–to the advantage of the Americans.48 Buffon had claimed that the New World had nothing to compare with the ‘lordly elephant’ or the ‘mighty hippopotamus’, or the lion and the tiger. Nonsense, said Jefferson, and pointed to the Great Claw or Megalonyx. ‘What are we to think of a creature whose claws were eight inches long, when those of the lion are not 112 inches?’ Even by 1776, enough fossil bones of the mammoth had been found to show that it was indigenous to the New World and that it was a beast easily ‘five or six times’ larger than an elephant.49 Jefferson and his fellow Americans found other fruitful comparisons when they looked at population levels. In the rural areas of Europe, they pointed out, births outnumbered deaths. Not by much, but enough to keep population numbers stable. In the cities, however, the situation was much bleaker–numbers were dropping. In London alone there were five deaths for every four births and the city had added barely two thousand to her population in the first half of the century, and then only by dint of immigration from the surrounding countryside. Throughout England and France one in six babies did not live beyond their first birthday and some places were worse–in Breslau, for example, 42 per cent of children died before they were five.50 Across the Atlantic, on the other hand, ‘among Negroes as among whites’, and from the north to the south, the population was thriving. The English colonies had comprised a quarter of a million souls in the early years of the eighteenth century. By the time agitation for independence began, that had increased to more than a million and a half. Immigration was only half the picture. In the first American census, compiled in 1790 (a decade ahead of the first British effort), they counted almost four million inhabitants, but statistically the population was very different from that in Europe. ‘Whereas the average marriage in London, Paris Amsterdam or Berlin produced four children, in America the number was closer to six and a half. In England there was one birth for every twenty-six inhabitants, in America one birth for every twenty inhabitants.’51 The figures for death were even more revealing: the average length of life in Europe in those days was thirty-two years, but in America it was forty-five.
In Jefferson himself America had a one-man riposte to Europe. Here, inside this one skin, was a soul who imported Palladio to Virginia, building at Monticello what Gary Wills calls the most beautiful building in America. Jefferson embraced the new economics of Adam Smith, experimented with grains and plants (agriculture, he said, was ‘a science of the very first order’) and, on top of his concern to forge a new country without the vices of the Old World, still found time to learn Greek and Latin.52 Jefferson led the way, intellectually at least, in his attempts to tame the wilderness. He carried out breeding experiments with cabbages and Jerusalem artichokes, with all kinds of nuts, with figs and rice, with mulberry trees and cork trees, and olive trees. ‘He sat up all night watching Lombards make cheese so he could introduce the process to America…and tried, in vain, to domesticate the nightingale.’53 He made astronomical observations and was one of the first to see the advantages that might derive from digging a canal through Panama.54
This sturdy, practical optimism of the early Americans succeeded far more often than it failed, to create a national mood and character and approach to life that exists to this day. There was only one area where the Americans were unsure of themselves: this was in their relations with the Indians. Buffon and some of the other French philosophes had (from 3,500 miles away) called the Indians degenerate. Try fighting him, Jefferson responded. ‘You will sing a different tune.’55 He referred to the rhetoric and eloquence of Logan, chief of the Mingoes: this underlined that Indian minds, no less than their bodies, were as well adapted to their circumstances as were Europeans.56 But, if Logan and his fellow Indians were blessed with all the qualities Jefferson said, if the Indian leader had all the qualities of Demosthenes and Cicero, as Jefferson also said, what right had white Americans to slaughter them in such numbers and appropriate their land?57 American views veered inconsistently, from the early Spanish argument, that the Indian
was not wholly human, incapable of responding to the faith, to the view of the philosophes, that he was primitive, to that of the romantics, that he was noble. In time, they settled to a more realistic view, as epitomised in the works of Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). But by then the damage had been done.
But it was in politics that the forceful genius of the early Americans was at its finest. Here too the comparisons with the Old World served to clarify what Americans were escaping from. For the most part, European political practices reflected a set of old ideas, now discredited.
England was as bad as anywhere, its political statistics shaming. Its population at the time was roughly nine million but of those barely 200,000 had the vote.58 This minority,2.2 per cent of the population, filled all the offices of government, army, navy, church, law courts and the colonial administration. Except in Scotland, only they were entitled to enter the universities, where all were expected to take ordination. It was little better elsewhere. This was the age of absolutism in many countries, where monarchies ruled without any requirement to consult parliaments or estates. In France, ruled by a king, commissions in the army were available only to those who could show four generations of noble forebears. In many areas of Europe, government offices were hereditary and in England seventy seats in parliament were returned from constituencies with no electors. ‘In Hungary the nobles had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities, and were exempt most taxes.’59 In Germany the margrave of Ansbach shot one of his hunting party because the man had dared to contradict him and the Count of Nassau-Diegen likewise executed a peasant just to show he could get away with it.60 In Venice, which had a population of some 150,000, only 1,200 nobles were entitled to attend the Great Council.61 In the Low Countries (which had loaned the new republic substantial sums), where there were a free press, free universities and a higher level of literacy, the gulf between rich and poor was not so glaring.62 ‘Even so, Amsterdam was still ruled by thirty-six men who inherited their offices and held them for life.’63
Put like this (and I have depended heavily on Henry Steel Commager’s account of the early days of America), it is not hard to see why Franklin, Jefferson and their colleagues should wish to be different. At the same time, however, America offered some striking natural advantages. It was a land without a monarchy, there was no established church and the hierarchy that entailed. There was no empire, no established legal system, none of the pomp of tradition. Politics was the natural beneficiary of this.
The pristine nature of America ensured, for example, that democracy was established on the western shores of the Atlantic and–equally important–that it was similar from community to community. Town meetings and local courts emerged in much the same way across all fledgling states, and they moved toward male suffrage at much the same pace in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont and Georgia. ‘It was out of this world that Benjamin Franklin and Charles Thomson emerged in Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams and Joseph Hawley in Massachusetts, Alexander McDougall and Aaron Burr in New York, Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton in Virginia.’ In the Old World, as has often been observed, these men would have been excluded from politics. Moreover, the Franklins and the Pendletons were not separated from their constituents in a capital city or a distant court.64
There were shortcomings. The early state constitutions all stipulated a religious qualification for voters. Pennsylvania, so liberal in other ways, and so oil-rich, had to begin with no religious restrictions, but then required all office-holders to be Protestants and to swear their belief in the divine inspiration of both the Old and the New Testaments.65 On occasions, offices seemed to run in families (Connecticut, New York and the South) but they were a long way from the hereditary practices of Europe.
Early America atits best is shown by the Convention that drafted the federal constitution. This ‘assembly of demigods’ (the phrase is Jefferson’s) provided, for the first time in history, that all offices–all–would be open to each and every man. Even for the president himself–the New World equivalent of a monarch in Europe–there were only two requirements: he must be native born and thirty-five years old (the average life-span in Europe at the time, remember, was thirty-two). There were no religious requirements, another move unprecedented in modern history. ‘In America Plato was vindicated: for the first time in history philosophers were kings.’66
The sheer speed with which these events unfolded was as important as their content and direction. The nations of Europe had taken generations–centuries–to evolve their different identities but in America, a new nation with a fully-fledged self-consciousness and a distinctive identity was fashioned in a single brilliant generation. In Thomas Paine’s words, ‘Our citizenship in the United States is our national character…Our great title is Americans.’
‘Not only was American nationalism achieved with a swiftness unprecedented in history, but what was achieved was a new kind of nationalism. It was not imposed by a conqueror or a monarch. It was not dependent on an established church at whose altars all worshipped alike, or upon the power of a ruling class. It did not draw its strength from a traditional enemy. It came from the people; it was an act of will.’67 Nor should we overlook the fact that, for many Americans, their nation was a repudiation–conscious or unconscious–of the worst features of the Old World. More than a few had been forced to flee and so their new nation was all the sweeter and all the more speedily and satisfactorily formed. People were free in ways almost unthinkable in the Old World, free to marry whoever they wanted, free to worship whichever God they wanted, free to work at whatever occupation they wanted, free to attend whichever college they wanted and, above all, free to say and think whatever they wanted. In this sense, the invention of America was a moral act.68
This was all made easier by two factors. One was the presence of the Indian, the ‘cudgelled people’ in W. H. Auden’s phrase, which enabled the newcomers to unite against a common enemy, and to provide Americans with their own imaginative focus.69 The second factor was that, for the first time, the religious dissenters and sectarians made up a majority. There were established churches in America–Congregational and Anglican for example–but the majority of people who had themselves been victims of religious bigotry had no wish to perpetuate the sin.70
Finally, we must not overlook the revolution itself and the processes leading up to it, as a set of events instrumental in creating a sense of common destiny and of nationalism. Men from very different states fought side-by-side, with no mercenaries. Alongside their military successes, over a considerable Old World force, it provided them with a series of legends and heroes–Washington and Valley Forge, Nathan Hale and John Paul Jones–and it gave them the symbols of the new nation, the flag and the bald eagle.71 (Hugh Brogan says the flag is one of only two sacred things in the United States–the other is the White House.72)
Something approaching a colonial government had been broached as early as 1754, in the Albany Plan of Union. In the 1760s the Stamp Act Congress brought together delegates from nine colonies, among whom were several who were to feature in the Revolution. Which meant that by the time of the First Continental Congress many of America’s leaders knew one another. This proved critical in helping form the union just six months before Yorktown. ‘Had there not been an effective union before this, there might never have been a Yorktown…To an extent unimaginable in the Old World, American nationalism was a creation of the people themselves: it was self-conscious and self-generating. Here it was the frontiersmen and the farmers, the fishermen and the woodsmen, the shopkeepers and apprentices, the small-town lawyers (there were no barristers), the village clergy (there were no bishops), the country schoolteachers (there were no dons) who provided the warp and woof for the fabric of nationalism.’73 In 1782, M. G. Jean de Crèvecoeur, a naturalised Frenchman, decided that America had fashioned ‘a new race of men’, and came up with the image of a ‘melting pot’.74
Lacking a monarch
, a court, an established church, and centuries of ‘tradition’, the Founding Fathers of the new republic, in their wisdom, turned to law. As Henry Steel Commager has observed, for forty years every president of the new nation, every vice-president and Secretary of State, with the exception of Washington himself, was a lawyer.75
Lawyers had written the Declaration of Independence and it was mainly lawyers who drafted the constitutions of the states and of the new United States. One effect of this was to shape early American literature. In Revolutionary America there were no poets, dramatists or even novelists who could begin to compare with the political writings of Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Tom Paine or James Wilson. The new nation was politically-minded and legally-minded. ‘They did away with ecclesiastical law, administrative law and even chancery law, and limited the reach of common law–it all reeked of the Old World of privilege and corruption.’ It was this attitude that gave rise to the idea of judicial supremacy, and judicial review. It was this attitude that gave rise to the separation of powers. It gave rise to the law school and to the abolition of the distinction between barrister and solicitor.76 There would be no America as we know it without the Puritan Revolution, the ideas of John Locke and Montesquieu and a knowledge of republican Rome, but Tom Paine (the ‘lethargic visionary’ in John Ferling’s words) was surely right when he observed that ‘the case and circumstance of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world…We are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived at the beginning of time.’77
