For Use in American History at the University of Arkansas.
"REPUBLICANISM" from Gordon
Wood's Creation of the American Republic.
1. A NEW PEOPLE FOR A NEW WORLD
It was obviously a most exciting day for young Thomas Shippen, a Philadelphia
gentleman of social prominence, when Thomas Jefferson presented him in 1788
to the French Court at Versailles. For Shippen, as a friend cautioned Jefferson,
was very socially conscious, apt to "run wild after the tinsel of life,"
and had eagerly anticipated his Continental tour with all its opportunities
for cultivating "the acquaintance of titled men and Ladies of birth,"
whose names, the friend regretfully observed, "he soon gets and ...
will never forget." And nowhere on earth were there more tinsel and
titles than at the Court of Versailles, more indeed than Shippen in his
wildest fancies had imagined. So ceremonious, so luxurious was the French
Court that this pretentious Philadelphian could only feel himself "a
stranger" in its midst. He could not restrain himself from expressing
amazement at the "Oriental splendor and magnificence" of it all.
The wealth, the sophistication, the pomp dazzled him: the pictures of the
royal family were "larger than life"; the members of the Court
had "all separate households and distinct portions of the Palace allotted
to them" and "between them they expend 36,000,000 of livres a
year"; and the royal gardens -"What walks! What groves! What water
works! " It was all so "superb" and so "very splendid,"
filled with ceremony and behavior, said Shippen, as "I had never seen."
Overawed, he could only puff with pride on having "received very uncommon
marks of politeness and attention" from the nobility of the Court.
Yet all the time he knew he was being snubbed. He sensed that the "oppressive
. . . civilities" of the courtiers were condescending, that their polite
questions only "served to shew rather a desire to be attentive to me,
than to be informed of what they did not know already." The American,
something of an aristocrat in Philadelphia but hardly one at Versailles,
could not help feeling his difference; and that difference understandably
became the shield for his self-esteem. He was, after all, as he told his
father, a republican: geographically and socially he was from another world.
The magnificence and elegance both impressed and repulsed him. How many
thousands of subjects, Shippen asked, were doomed to want and wretchedness
by the King's wasteful efforts "to shroud his person and adorn his
reign" with such luxury? He "revolted" at the King's "insufferable
arrogance," and was even "more mortified at the suppleness and
base complaisance of his attendants." He rejoiced that he was not a
subject of such a monarchy, but the citizen of a republic - "more great
because more virtuous" - where there were no hereditary distinctions,
no "empty ornament and unmeaning grandeur," where only sense,
merit, and integrity commanded respect. He observed beneath all the splendor
of the courtiers "an uneasiness and ennui in their faces." The
whole wonderful and bitter experience only convinced him "that a certain
degree of equality is essential to human bliss. Happy above all Countries
is our Country," he exulted," where that equality is found, without
destroying the necessary subordination."
For most Americans, as for Shippen, this was the deeply felt meaning of
the Revolution: they had created a new world, a republican world. No one
doubted that the new polities would be republics, and, as Thomas Paine pointed
out, "What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government."
Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a
king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension,
a utopian depth, to the political separation from England - a depth that
involved the very character of their society. "We are now really another
people," exclaimed Paine in 1782.
Socially, of course, they were not really another people, despite much economic
unsettling and the emigration of thousands of Tories. But intellectually
and culturally they were - and this is what Paine meant. "Our style
and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary than
the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear
with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used."
Republicanism did not signal the immediate collapse of the traditional social
organization; but it did possess a profound social significance. The Revolution
was intended in fact to "form a new era and give a new turn to human
affairs." From the moment in 1774 and 1775 when independence and hence
the formation of new governments became a distinct possibility, and continuing
throughout the war, nearly every piece of writing concerned with the future
of the new republics was filled with extraordinarily idealistic hopes for
the social and political transformation of America. The Americans had come
to believe that the Revolution would mean nothing less than a reordering
of eighteenth-century society and politics as they had known and despised
them - a reordering that was summed up by the conception of republicanism.
2. THE APPEAL OF ANTIQUITY
When in 1807 John Adams told Mercy Warren that he had "never understood"
what a republic was, and "no other man ever did or ever will,"
his memory was playing him badly. These repeated statements of his later
years that a republic "may signify any thing, every thing, or nothing"
represented the bewilderment of a man whom ideas had passed by. Back in
1776 republicanism was not such a confused conception in the minds of Americans.
When Adams himself talked of "a Republican Spirit, among the People,"
and the eradication of "Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical
Pride," he seems to have understood clearly what it denoted, for the
events of the 1760's and seventies had, he said, "frequently reminded"
him of the "principles and reasonings" of "Sidney, Harrington,
Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly." However scorned
by " modern Englishmen," these writers had a particular relevance
for Adams and countless other Americans in 1776: "they will convince
any candid mind, that there is no good government but what is republican."
To the radical Whigs, rooted in the Commonwealth period of the seventeenth
century, the perfect government was always republican. Since a republic
represented not so much the formal structure of a government as it did its
spirit, pure Whigs could even describe the English mixed monarchy as ideally
a republic. Consequently the principles of republicanism permeated much
of what the colonists read and found attractive. In fact, "the true
principles of republicanism are at present so well understood," so
much taken for granted, so much a part of the Americans' assumptions about
politics, that few felt any need formally to explain their origin. There
was, however, for all Whigs, English and American, one historical source
of republican inspiration that was everywhere explicitly acknowledged -
classical antiquity, where the greatest republics in history had flourished.
For Americans, the mid-eighteenth century was truly a neoclassical age -
the high point of their classical period. At one time or another almost
every Whig patriot took or was given the name of an ancient republican hero,
and classical references and allusions run through much of the colonists'
writings, both public and private. It was a rare newspaper essayist who
did not use a Greek or Latin phrase to enhance an argument or embellish
a point and who did not employ a classical signature. John Dickinson lived
up to his reputation for "Attic eloquence and Roman spirit" by
ending each of his Farmer's Letters with an appropriate classical quotation.
Such classicism was not only a scholarly ornament of educated Americans;
it helped to shape their values and their ideals of behavior. "The
Choice of Hercules, as engraved by Gribeline in some Editions of Lord Shaftsburys
Works," which John Adams proposed to the Continental Congress as a
seal commemorating the British evacuation of Boston, was a commonplace of
the age. Man was pictured in classical terms struggling between the forces
of virtue and vice, reason and passion. Rural life was celebrated not for
its wild or natural beauty but for its simplicity and repose to which in
Horatian fashion virtuous men could retire after a lifetime of devotion
to duty and country. The traits of character most praised were the classical
ones - restraint, temperance, fortitude, dignity, and independence. Washington
seemed to his contemporaries to fit the ideal perfectly; and someone like
Landon Carter could only lament that everyone was not as Washington was,
"not so much in quest of praise and emolument to yourself as of real
good to your fellow-creatures."
Yet it was not as scholarly embellishment or as a source of values that
antiquity was most important to Americans in these revolutionary years.
The American's compulsive interest in the ancient republics was in fact
crucial to their attempt to understand the moral and social basis of politics:
"Half our learning is their epitaph." Because this "treading
upon the Republican ground of Greece and Rome," as Edmund Pendleton
said of the Virginians in the Convention of 1776, had such a direct political
purpose, the Americans' cult of antiquity cannot really be separated from
their involvement in the English Commonwealth heritage, for the two were
inextricably entwined. The classical world had been the main source of inspiration
and knowledge for enlightened politicians at least since Machiavelli, and
never more so than to the classical republicans and their heirs of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The Americans therefore did not always possess
an original or unglossed antiquity; they often saw a refracted image, saw
the classical past as the Western world since the Renaissance had seen it.
While some Americans did own and read the ancient authors in Latin and Greek,
most generally preferred translations, popularizations, and secondary surveys
that were often edited and written by radical Whigs - Thomas Gordon's Sallust
and Tacitus, Basil Kennet's Roman Antiquities, Walter Moyle's
dabblings in antiquity, and Edward Wortley Montagu's Reflections on the
Rise and Fall of the Antient Republicks.
Since the aim of most of these popularizations and translations was didactic,
to discover, in Montagu's words, "the principal causes of that degeneracy
of manners, which reduc'd those once brave and free people into the most
abject slavery," the Americans' view of antiquity was highly selective,
focusing on decline and decadence. "The 'moss-grown' columns and broken
arches of those once-renowned empires are full with instruction" for
a people attempting to rebuild a republican world. The names of the ancient
republics-Athens, Lacedaemon, Sparta - had "grown trite by repetition,"
and none more than Rome. There was nothing startling about Gibbon's choice
of subject. "Rome," he wrote in his Autobiography, "is
familiar to the schoolboy and the statesman." This familiarity was
not simply the consequence of Rome's preeminence in the ancient world and
its influence on Western culture but was also the result of the peculiar
character of the literary legacy Rome had passed on to the modern world,
a body of writing that was obsessed with the same questions about degeneracy
that fascinated the eighteenth century. Enlightened men everywhere in the
eighteenth century found much of what they wanted to know about antiquity
from the period that has been called the Roman Enlightenment - the golden
age of Latin literature from the breakdown of the Republic in the middle
of the first century B.C. to the establishment of the Empire in the middle
of the second century A.D. Writing at a time when the greatest days of the
Republic were crumbling or already gone, pessimistic Romans - Cicero, Sallust,
Tacitus, Plutarch - contrasted the growing corruption and disorder they
saw about them with an imagined earlier republican world of ordered simplicity
and acadian virtue and sought continually to explain the transformation.
It was as if these Latin writers in their literature of critical lamentation
and republican nostalgia had spoken directly to the revolutionary concerns
of the eighteenth century.
From these kinds of antique writings, filtered and fused into the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, the Americans had learned "the melancholy truth"
about the ancient republics "that were once great and illustrious,
but are now no more" and had used their knowledge in their diagnosis
of the ills of the mother country in the 1760's and 1770's. "Similar
causes will forever operate like effects in the political, moral, and physical
world: those vices which ruined the illustrious republics of Greece, and
the mighty commonwealth of Rome, and which are now ruining Great Britain,
so late the first kingdom of Europe, must eventually overturn every state,
where their deleterious influence is suffered to prevail." The history
of antiquity thus became a kind of laboratory in which autopsies of the
dead republics would lead to a science of social sickness and health matching
the science of the natural world.
It was not the force of arms which made the ancient republics great or which
ultimately destroyed them. It was rather the character and spirit of their
people. Frugality, industry, temperance, and simplicity - the rustic traits
of the sturdy yeoman - were the stuff that made a society strong. The virile
martial qualities - the scorn of ease, the contempt of danger, the love
of valor - were what made a nation great. The obsessive term was luxury,
not mere
wealth but that "dull animal enjoyment" which left "minds
stupefied, and bodies enervated, by wallowing for ever in one continual
puddle of voluptuousness," was what corrupted a society: the love of
refinement, the desire for distinction and elegance eventually weakened
a people and left them soft and effeminate, dissipated cowards, unfit and
undesiring to serve the state. "Then slumbers that virtuous jealousy
of public men and public measures, which was wont to scrutinize not only
actions but motives: then nods that active zeal, which, with eagle eye watched,
and with nervous arm defended the constitution.... Thus, before a nation
is completely deprived of freedom, she must be fitted for slavery by her
vices." Republics died not from invasions from without but from decay
from within.
Out of their reading of the Latin classics and of the contemporary histories
of the ancient world, like Charles Rollin's popular studies, together with
diffuse thoughts drawn from the English classical republican heritage, all
set within the framework of Enlightenment science, the Americans put together
a conception of the ideal republican society - filled, said John Adams,
with "all great, manly, and warlike virtues"- that they would
have to have if they would sustain their new republics. The nostalgic image
of the Roman Republic became a symbol of all their dissatisfactions with
the present and their hopes for the future. "I us'd to regret,"
Charles Lee told Patrick Henry shortly after Independence, "not being
thrown into the World in the glorious third or fourth century of the Romans."
But now it seemed to Lee and to other American Whigs that these classical
republican dreams "at length bid fair for being realiz'd." No
one went as far as Lee did in sketching on paper a utopian plan for a republican
world, simple and agrarian, free of a debilitating commerce which could
only "emasculate the body, narrow the mind, and in fact corrupt every
true republican and manly principle." But many in 1776 necessarily
shared some of Lee's desires for a spartan egalitarian society where every
man was a soldier and master of his own soul and land, the kind of society,
like that of ancient Rome, where the people "instructed from early
infancy to deem themselves the property of the State ... were ever ready
to sacrifice their concerns to her interests."
3. THE PUBLIC GOOD
The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed
the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic
goal of their Revolution. From this goal flowed all of the Americans' exhortatory
literature and all that made their ideology truly revolutionary. This republican
ideology both presumed and helped shape the Americans' conception of the
way their society and politics should be structured and operated - a vision
so divorced from the realities of American society, so contrary to the previous
century of American experience, that it alone was enough to make the Revolution
one of the great utopian movements of American history. By 1776 the Revolution
came to represent a final attempt, perhaps - given the nature of American
society - even a desperate attempt, by many Americans to realize the traditional
Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would
be the only objective of government.
It is not surprising that the Tory, Jonathan Boucher, in his 1775 sermon,
"On Civil Liberty; Passive Obedience, and Non-resistance," should
have questioned the belief that the common good was the end of all government,
especially the "vague and loose" belief that the common good was
simply a matter of "common feelings" and "common consent."
For this conviction that "the Liberty and Happiness of the People is
confessedly the End of Government," best defined by the people themselves,
was central to all reformist thinking in the eighteenth century and had
become crucial to most Americans by 1776. "Though," as Jacob Duché,
Boucher's immediate antagonist, remarked, "no particular mode of government
is pointed out" by scripture, there could be no doubt that the "gospel
is directly opposed to every other form than such as has the common good
of mankind for its end and aim." It was self-evident, by "both
reason and revelation," said Samuel West, that the welfare and safety
of the people was "the supreme law of the state, -being the true standard
and measure" by which all laws and governmental actions were to be
judged. To eighteenth-century American and European radicals alike, living
in a world of monarchies, it seemed only too obvious that the great deficiency
of existing governments was precisely their sacrificing of the public good
to the private greed of small ruling groups. "Strange as it may seem,"
said Josiah Quincy in 1774, "what the many through successive ages
have desired and sought, the few have found means to baffle and defeat."
To make the people's welfare - the public good - the exclusive end of government
became for the Americans, as one general put it, their "Polar Star,"
the central tenet of the Whig faith, shared not only by Hamilton and Paine
at opposite ends of the Whig spectrum, but by any American bitterly opposed
to a system which held "that a Part is greater than its Whole; or in
other Words, that some Individuals ought to be considered , even to the
Destruction of the Community, which they compose." No phrase except
"liberty" was invoked more often by the Revolutionaries than "the
public good." It expressed the colonists' deepest hatreds of the old
order and their most visionary hopes for the new.
From the logic of belief that "all government is or ought to be, calculated
for the general good and safety of the community," for which end "the
most effectual means that human wisdom hath ever been able to devise, is
frequently appealing to the body of the people," followed the Americans'
unhesitating adoption of republicanism in 1776. The peculiar excellence
of republican government was that it was "wholly characteristical of
the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be instituted."
By definition it had no other end than the welfare of the people: res
publica, the public affairs, or the public good. "The word republic,"
said Thomas Paine, "means the public good, or the good of the
whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of
the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government." Its
most exact English equivalent was commonwealth, by which was meant, as Edmund
Pendleton suggested, a state belonging to the whole people rather than the
Crown. While several of the new states, as John Adams urged, took this "most
consistent style" of commonwealth manfully and explicitly in 1776,
all of the states shared in its meaning.
Since in a free government the public good was identical with the people's
welfare, a "matter of COMMON FEELING" and founded on the "COMMON
CONSENT" of the people, the best way of realizing it in the Whig mind
was to allow the people a maximum voice in the government. "That the
great body of the people," as even the Tory William Smith of Philadelphia
admitted, "can have any interest separate form their country or (when
fairly understood) pursue any other, is not to be imagined," "unless,"
as John Sullivan said, "we suppose them idiots or self-murderers."
Therefore any government which lacked a "proper representation of people"
or was in any way even "independent of the people" was liable
to violate the common good and become tyrannical." Most Whigs had little
doubt of the people's honesty or even of their ability to discern what was
good for themselves. It was a maxim, declared by a New York patriot, "that
whatever may be the particular opinions of Individuals, the bulk of the
people, both mean, and think right." Was there ever any fear, James
Burgh had gone so far as to ask, that the people might be "too free
to consult the general good?" Of course even the most radical English
Whigs admitted that the people might sometimes mistake their own interest
and might often be unable to effect it even when they did correctly perceive
it. Most Americans therefore assumed that the people, in their representational
expression of their collective liberty in the houses of representatives,
could not run the whole government. "Liberty, though the most essential
requisite in government," Richard Price had written, "is not the
only one; wisdom, union, dispatch, secrecy, and vigour are likewise requisite"
- qualities best supplied by a magistracy and a senate.
Yet such governors and upper houses, however necessary, must be electively
dependent on the people. Republicanism with its elective magistracy would
not eliminate the problems of politics and the threat of power, but it did
promise a new era of stability and cooperation between rulers and ruled.
The chronic divisiveness of colonial politics ("the denominations Of
WHIG and TORY ... distinctions that properly belong only to the subjects
of Great Britain") would now disappear in the unhindered and engrossing
pursuit of only the people's welfare. For decades, and especially in recent
years, the Crown's presence in America had played havoc with the colonists'
political life and was the real source of that factious behavior of which
royal officials had so repeatedly and unjustly accused them. "Every
man that has lived any time in America, under regal government, knows what
frequent, and almost continual opposition there is between the country interest
and those in power." "By keeping clear of British government,"
the Americans could at last be rid of those "jars and contentions between
Governors and Assemblies." By allowing the people to elect their magistracy,
republicanism would work to "blend the interests of the people and
their rulers" and thus "put down every animosity among the people.
In the kind of states where "their governors shall proceed form the
midst of them" the people could be surer that their interests exclusively
would be promoted, and therefore in turn would "pay obedience to officers
properly appointed" and maintain "no discontents on account of
their advancement.
What made the Whig conception of politics and the republican emphasis on
the collective welfare of the people comprehensible was the assumption that
the people, especially when set against their rulers were a homogeneous
body whose "interests when candidly considered are one." Since
everyone in the community was linked organically to everyone else, what
was good for the whole community was good for all the parts. The people
were in fact a single organic piece (for god hath so tempered the body that
there should be no Schism in the body, but that the Members should have
the same care for one another") with a unitary concern that was the
only legitimate objective of governmental policy. This common interest was
not, as we might today think of it, simply the sum or consensus of the particular
interests that made up the community. It was rather an entity in itself,
prior to and distinct from the various private interests of groups and individuals.
As Samuel Adams said in 1776, paraphrasing Vattel, the state was "a
moral person, having an interest and will of its own." Because politics
was conceived to be not the reconciling but the transcending of the different
interests of the society in the search for the single common good, the republican
state necessarily had to be small in territory and generally similar in
interests. Despite sporadic suggestions in the press for "a simple
government" of a strong continental congress chosen "by the people,
(not by their representatives)," and uniting all the people "in
one great republick," few Americans thought that such an extensive
continental republic, as distinct from a league of states, was feasible
in 1776 - however much they may have differed over the desirable strength
of the expected confederation.
No one, of course, denied that the community was filled with different,
often clashing combinations of interests. But apart from the basic conflict
between governors and people these were not to be dignified by their incorporation
into formal political theory or into any serious discussion of what ought
to be. In light of the assumption that the state was "to be considered
as one moral whole" these interests and parties were regarded as aberrations
or perversions, indeed signs of sickness in the body politic. Although some
eighteenth-century thinkers were in fact beginning to perceive the inevitability,
even the desirability, of faction in a free state, most continued to regard
division among the people as "both dangerous and destructive,"
arising "from false ambition, avarice, or revenge." Men lost control
of their basest passions and were unwilling to sacrifice their immediate
desires for the corporate good. Hence, "party differences," however
much they may infect the society, could never ideally be admitted into the
institutions of government, but "would be dropped at the threshold
of the state house." The representatives of the people would not act
as spokesmen for private and partial interests, but all would be "disinterested
men, who could have no interest of their own to seek," and "would
employ their whole time for the public good; then there would be but one
interest, the good of the people at large."'
There was nothing really new about these republican principles; John Winthrop
would have found them congenial. In fact, republicanism as the Americans
expressed it in 1776 possessed a decidedly reactionary tone. It embodied
the ideal of the good society as it had been set forth from antiquity through
the eighteenth century. This traditional conception of the organic community
was still a cliché, although an increasingly weakening cliché,
of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's "general will" was only
one brilliant effort among many more pedestrian attempts to discover somehow
above all the diverse and selfish wills the one supreme moral good to which
all parts of the body politic must surrender. The very fact that the social
basis for such a corporate ideal had long been disintegrating, if it ever
existed, only accentuated its desirability in American eyes. Despite, or
perhaps because of, the persistence of social incoherence and change in
the eighteenth century, Americans creating a new society could not conceive
of the state in any other terms than organic unity. Although by mid-century
the peculiar Filmerist emphasis on monarchical paternalism was decidedly
moribund (despite Boucher's efforts to revive it), the compelling theory
of order characteristic of Western thought for centuries was not. Whatever
differences may have existed among the Whigs, all those committed to revolution
and republicanism in 1776 necessarily shared an essentially similar vision
of the corporate commonwealth - a vision of varying distinctness fed by
both millennial Christianity and pagan classicism. Enlightened rationalism
and evangelical Calvinism were not at odds in 1776; both when interpreted
by Whigs placed revolutionary emphasis on the general will of the community
and on the responsibility of the collective people to define it. The contracts,
balancing mechanisms, and individual rights so much talked of in 1776 were
generally regarded as defenses designed to protect a united people against
their rulers and not as devices intended to set off parts of the people
against the majority. Few Whigs in 1776 were yet theoretically prepared
to repudiate the belief in the corporate welfare as the goal of politics
or to accept divisiveness and selfishness as the normative behavior of men.
The ideal which republicanism was beautifully designed to express was still
a harmonious integration of all parts of the community.
Yet ironically it was precisely internal discord and conflict for which
republics were most widely known. Throughout history "free republican
governments have been objected to, as if exposed to factions from an excess
of liberty." But this was because liberty had been misunderstood and
falsely equated with licentiousness or the liberty of man in a state of
nature which was "a state of war, rapine, and murder." True liberty
was "natural liberty restrained in such manner, as to render society
one great family; where every one must consult his neighbour's happiness,
as well as his own." In a republic "each individual gives up all
private interest that is not consistent with the general good, the interest
of the whole body." For the republican patriots of 1776 the commonweal
was all-encompassing - a transcendent object with a unique moral worth that
made partial considerations fade into insignificance. "Let regard be
had only to the good of the whole" was the constant exhortation by
publicists and clergy. Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual.
"A Citizen," said Samuel Adams, "owes everything to the commonwealth."
"Every man in a republic," declared Benjamin Rush, "is public
property. His time and talents - his youth -his manhood - his old age -
nay more, life, all belong to his country." "No man is a true
republican," wrote a Pennsylvanian in 1776, "that will not give
up his single voice to that of the public."
Individual liberty and the public good were easily reconcilable because
the important liberty in the Whig ideology was public or political liberty.
In 1776 the solution to the problems of American politics seemed to rest
not so much in emphasizing the private rights of individuals against the
general will as it did in stressing the public rights of the collective
people against the supposed privileged interests of their rulers. "Civil
Liberty," as one colonist put it, was not primarily individual; it
was "the freedom of bodies politic, or States." Because, as Josiah
Quincy said, the people "as a body" were "never interested
to injure themselves," and were "uniformly desirous of the general
welfare," there could be no real sense of conflict between public and
personal liberty." Indeed, the private liberties of individuals depended
upon their collective public liberty. "The security to justice,"
said one American in 1776, "is the political liberty of the State."
"In every state or society of men," declared Benjamin Church in
1773, "personal liberty and security must depend upon the collective
power of the whole, acting for the general interest." The people were
the best asylum for individual rights. "All property," declared
Thomas Paine, "is safe under their protection." Government which
the people had a proper share, wrote Richard Price, "therefore, does
not infringe liberty, but establish it. It does not take away the rights
of mankind, but protect and confirm them." Whatever conflict existed
was due to selfish individuals who asserted privileges against the common
interest of the people. The Americans, wrote Landon Carter in 1760, could
never allow a minority of individuals to differ from the majority when the
very well-being of the society was at stake. "One or a few" could
never "be better Judges" of the communal "Good than was the
multitude." In truth, the suspension of "Private justice"
or the suppression of minority rights for the sake of the public good was
"a Thing absolutely necessary to be done" and "therefore
just in itself." Since the American Whigs, like Locke before them,
regarded the people as a unitary, property-holding, homogeneous body - not
"the vile populace or rabble of the country, nor the cabal of a small
number of factious persons, but," said John Adams quoting Pufendorf,
"the greater and more judicious part of the subjects, of all ranks"
- few found it necessary or even intelligible to work out any theoretical
defense of minority rights against the collective power of the majority
of the people. Although some Americans, like the Tory Daniel Leonard, were
grappling with the problem before the Revolution, charging that the people
were the real source of despotism, their arguments were quickly rebuffed
by rabid Whigs. In the Whig conception of politics a tyranny by the people
was theoretically inconceivable, because the power held by the people was
liberty, whose abuse could only be licentiousness or anarchy, not tyranny.
As John Adams indignantly pointed out, the idea of the public liberty's
being tyrannical was illogical: "a democratical despotism is a contradiction
in terms."
Thus in the minds of most Whigs in 1776 individual rights, even the basic
civil liberties that we consider so crucial, possessed little of their modern
theoretical relevance when set against the will of the people. This is why,
for example, throughout the eighteenth century the Americans could contend
for the broadest freedom of speech against the magistracy, while at the
same time punishing with a severe strictness any seditious libels against
the representatives of the people in the colonial assemblies. Anyone who
tried to speak against the interests of the people "should be held
in execration. . . . Every word, that tends to weaken the hands of the people
is a crime of devilish dye"; indeed, "it is the unpardonable Sin
in politics." Thus it was "no Loss of Liberty, that court-minions
can complain of, when they are silenced. No man has a right to say a word,
which may lame the liberties of his country." It was conceivable to
protect the common law liberties of the people against their rulers, but
hardly against the people themselves. "For who could be more free than
the People who representatively exercise supreme Power over themselves?"
This same celebration of the public welfare and the safety of the people
also justified the very severe restrictions put on private interests and
rights throughout the Revolutionary crisis. The coercion and intimidation
used by public and quasi-public bodies, conventions and committees, against
various individuals and minority groups, the extent of which has never been
fully appreciated, was completely sanctioned by these classical Whig beliefs.
As David Ramsay later recalled, "the power of these bodies was undefined;
but by common consent it was comprehended in the old Roman maxim: 'To take
care that the commonwealth should receive no damage.'" But it was not
simply a matter of invoking the Ciceroian maxim, Salus Populi suprema
Lex est. The extensive mercantilist regulation of the economy, the numerous
attempts in the early years of the war to suppress prices, control wages,
and prevent monopolies, reaching from the Continental Congress down through
the states to counties and towns, was in no way inconsistent with the spirit
of '76, but in fact was ideally expressive of what republicanism meant.
In the minds of the most devoted Commonwealthmen it was the duty of a republic
to control "the selfishness of mankind ... ; for liberty consists not
in the permission to distress fellow citizens, by extorting extravagant
advantages from them, in matters of commerce or otherwise." Because
it was commonly understood that "the exorbitant wealth of individuals"
had a "most baneful influence" on the maintenance of republican
governments and "therefore should be carefully guarded against,"
some Whigs were even willing to go so far as to advocate agrarian legislation
limiting the amount of property an individual could hold and "sumptuary
laws against luxury, plays, etc. and extravagant expenses in dress, diet,
and the like."
Even at the beginning, however, there were some good Whigs who perceived
the inherent conflict between individual liberty and traditional republican
theory. Ancient Sparta, William Moore Smith told the members of the Continental
Congress in the spring of 1775, had demonstrated the problem. Knowing that
luxury was the great enemy of republicanism and liberty, Lycurgus had sought
to avoid the evil by eliminating wealth itself. But in doing so he undermined
the very basis of freedom. "He seems not to have reflected that there
can be no true liberty without security of property; and where property
is secure, industry begets wealth; and wealth is often productive of a train
of evils naturally destructive to virtue and freedom!" "Here,
then," said Smith, "is a sad dilemma in politics." If the
people "exclude wealth, it must be by regulations intrenching too far
upon civil liberty." But if wealth is allowed to flourish, "the
syren luxury" soon follows at its heels and gradually contaminates
the whole society. "What is to be done in this case?" Must the
society, "to secure the first of blessings, liberty," strangle
wealth, the first offspring of liberty, in its birth and thus in effect
destroy liberty as well? "Or, is there no proper use of wealth and
civil happiness, the genuine descendants of civil liberty, without abusing
them to the nourishment of luxury and corruption?" Smith, like other
Whigs in 1776, thought there was an answer to the dilemma in the more enlightened
policy and "purer system of religion" of this modern age - "to
regulate the use of wealth, but not to exclude it."
The dilemma was not new, but was actually the central issue Americans had
wrestled with since the seventeenth century. Nearly every intellectual movement
from Puritanism to Quakerism to Arminianism had struggled with the problems
involved in the social maturation of the American body politic, in a continuing
effort to find the means of controlling the amassing and expenditure of
men's wealth without doing violence to their freedom. American intellectual
life was an intensive search for an ever-renewed compression of tensions
for the aspiring Americans who were allowed prosperity but denied luxury.
The republicanism of 1776 actually represented a new, more secular version
of this same steel spring, a new mode of confronting and resisting the temptations
and luxury of the world, a new social restraint to which, said Smith, "all
systems of education, all laws, all the efforts of patriotism, ought to
be directed."
4. THE NEED FOR VIRTUE
Perhaps everyone in the eighteenth century could have agreed that in theory
no state was more beautiful than a republic, whose whole object by definition
was the good of the people. Yet everyone also knew that it was a fragile
beauty indeed. It was axiomatic that no society could hold together without
the obedience of its members to the legally constituted authority. In a
monarchy the complicated texture of the society, "the magnificence,
costly equipage and dazzling splendors" lavished on the prince, the
innumerable titles, the degrees and subordination of ranks, the pervading
sense of honor, the "multitude of criminal laws, with severe penalties,"
the very vigor of the unitary authority often with the aid of a standing
army and an established religious hierarchy, all worked to maintain public
order, even though in the eyes of a good Commonwealthman it was an order
built on show, where "respect and obedience" were derived "only
from the passion of fear." But in a republic which possessed none of
this complicated social texture, where the elected rulers were merely "in
fact the servants of the public" and known by all "to be but men,"
and where the people themselves shared in a large measure of the governing
- in such a state, order, if there was to be any, must come from below."
The very greatness of republicanism, its utter dependence on the people,
was at the same time its source of weakness. In a republic there was no
place for fear; there could be no sustained coercion from above. The state,
like no other, rested on the consent of the governed freely given and not
compelled. In a free government the laws, as the American clergy never tired
of repeating, had to be obeyed by the people for conscience's sake, not
for wrath's.
As Jonathan Boucher warned, by resting the whole structure of government
on the unmitigated willingness of the people to obey, the Americans were
making a truly revolutionary transformation in the structure of authority.
In shrill and despairing pamphlets the Tories insisted that the Whig ideas
were undermining the very principle of order. If respect and obedience to
the established governments were refused and if republicanism were adopted,
then, admonished Thomas Bradbury Chandler, "the bands of society would
be dissolved, the harmony of the world confounded, and the order of nature
subverted." The principles of the Revolutionaries, said Boucher, were
directed "clearly and literally against authority." They were
destroying "not only all authority over us as it now exists, but any
and all that it is possible to constitute." The Tory logic was indeed
frightening. Not only was the rebellion rupturing the people's habitual
obedience to the constituted government, but by the establishment of republicanism
the Whigs were also founding their new governments solely on the people's
voluntary acquiescence. And, as Blackstone had pointed out, "obedience
is an empty name, if every individual has a right to decide how far he himself
shall obey."
The Whigs were well aware of the hazards involved in the revolution they
were attempting. Many knew with Hamilton that when the people were "loosened
from their attachment to ancient establishments" they were apt "to
grow giddy" and "more or less to run into anarchy." Even
Samuel Adams warned in 1775 that "there may be Danger of Errors on
the Side of the People." Sensing the risk of licentiousness in the
throwing off of British authority, many Whig leaders urged the people from
the outset to "have their hearts and hands with the magistrates,"
for as long as their appointed rulers acted lawfully and for the public
good "they are bound to obey them." But despite Tory charges that
the Whig principles were "cutting asunder the sinews of government,
and breaking in pieces the ligament of social life," the Americans
in 1776 did not regard their republican beliefs as inherently anti-authoritarian.
The Revolution was designed to change the flow of authority-indeed the structure
of politics as the colonists had known it - but it was in no way intended
to do away with the principle of authority itself. "There must be,"
said John Adams in 1776, "a Decency, and Respect, and Veneration introduced
for Persons in Authority, of every Rank, or We are undone." The people
would naturally be more willing to obey their new republican rulers; for
now "love and not fear will become the spring of their obedience."
The elected republican magistrate would be distinguished not by titles or
connections but by his own inherent worth and would necessarily "know
no good, separate from that of his subjects." But such a change in
the nature of authority and the magistracy, the Whigs realized, only mitigated
the problem of obedience in a republican system. The people themselves must
change as well.
In a monarchy each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could
be restrained by fear or force. In a republic, however, each man must somehow
be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the
whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests
for the good of the community - such patriotism or love of country - the
eighteenth century termed "public virtue." A republic was such
a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character
in the people. Every state in which the people participated needed a degree
of virtue; but a republic which rested solely on the people absolutely required
it. Although a particular structural arrangement of the government in a
republic might temper the necessity for public virtue, ultimately "no
model of government whatever can equal the importance of this principle,
nor afford proper safety and security without it." "Without some
portion of this generous principle, anarchy and confusion would immediately
ensue, the jarring interests of individuals, regarding themselves only,
and indifferent to the welfare of others, would still further heighten the
distressing scene, and with the assistance of the selfish passions, it would
end in the ruin and subversion of the state." The eighteenth-century
mind was thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government "cannot
be supported without Virtue." Only with a public-spirited, self-sacrificing
people could the authority of a popularly elected ruler be obeyed, but "more
by the virtue of the people, than by the terror of his power." Because
virtue was truly the lifeblood of the republic, the thoughts and hopes surrounding
this concept of public spirit gave the Revolution its socially radical character
- an expected alteration in the very behavior of the people, "laying
the foundation in a constitution, not without or over, but within the subjects."
This public virtue, "this endearing and benevolent passion," was
"the noblest which can be displayed" and that men of the eighteenth
century sought in social behavior. "Its grand source" lay in the
attitudes and actions of the individuals who made up the society, "in
that charity which forms every social connection." In other words,
public virtue, the willingness of the people to surrender all, even their
lives, for the good of the state, was primarily the consequence of men's
individual private virtues. While some men of the eighteenth century could
see public virtue arising out of the individual's pride and need for approbation,
few endorsed Mandeville's paradoxical view that private vices produced public
virtue." For most Americans in 1776 vicious behavior by an individual
could have only disastrous results for the community. A man racked by the
selfish passions of greed, envy, and hate lost his conception of order;
"his sense of a connection with the general system-his benevolence
- his desire and freedom of doing good, ceased." It seemed obvious
that a republican society could not "be maintained without justice,
benevolence and the social virtues." Since at least the seventeenth
century, enlightened intellectuals had been fascinated with the attempt
to replace the fear of the hereafter as the basis for morality with a more
natural scientific psychology. The Earl of Shaftesbury in particular had
tried to convince men of the exquisite happiness and pleasure that would
flow from self-sacrifice and doing good. Somehow, as a Boston writer argued
in the manner of Francis Hutcheson, the individual's widening and traditionally
weakening circles of love - from himself to his family to the community
- must be broken into; men must be convinced that their fullest satisfaction
would come from the subordination of their individual loves to the greater
good of the whole. It was man's duty and interest to be benevolent. "The
happiness of every individual" depended "on the happiness of society:
It follows, that the practice of all the social virtues is the law of our
nature, and the law of our nature is the law of God." "Public
good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals; on the contrary,
it is the good of every individual collected." "The public good
is, as it were, a common bank in which every individual has his respective
share; and consequently whatever damage that sustains the individual unavoidably
partake of that calamity." Once men correctly perceived their relation
to the commonwealth they would never injure what was really their personal
interest to protect and sustain.
5. EQUALITY
That the Americans would come to perceive correctly their relation to the
state was not simply a matter of faith. The revolutionary change in the
structure of political authority involved in their adoption of republicanism
was to be matched and indeed ultimately sustained by a basic transformation
of their social structure. Henceforth their society would be governed, as
it had not been in the past, by the principle of equality - a principle
central to republican thinking, the very "life and soul," said
David Ramsay, of republicanism.
The doctrine possessed an inherent ambivalence: on one hand it stressed
equality of opportunity which implied social differences and distinctions;
on the other hand it emphasized equality of condition which denied these
same social differences and distinctions. These two meanings were intertwined
in the Americans' use of equality and it is difficult to separate them.
Many might agree that "if there could be something like an equality
of estate and property, it would tend much to preserve civil liberty,"
since, as everyone knew, "Luxury is always proportional to the inequality
of fortune." Yet despite some sporadic suggestions for leveling legislation,
most Whigs generally "acknowledged" that it was "a difficult
matter to secure a state from evils and mischiefs from . . . wealth and
riches." A real equality just "Cannot be expected."
Equality was thus not directly conceived of by most Americans in 1776, including
even a devout republican like Samuel Adams, as a social leveling; it would
not mean, as Thomas Shippen emphasized, the destruction of "the necessary
subordination." Rather it was considered to be an "equality, which
is adverse to every species of subordination beside that which arises from
the difference of capacity, disposition, and virtue." By republicanism
the Americans meant only to change the origin of social and political preeminence,
not to do away with such preeminence altogether. "In monarchies,"
commented David Ramsay, "favor is the source of preferment; but, in
our new forms of government, no one can command the suffrages of the people,
unless by his superior merit and capacity." In a republican system
only talent would matter. It was now possible "that even the reins
of state may be held by the son of the poorest man, if possessed of abilities
equal to the important station." The ideal, especially in the southern
colonies, was the creation and maintenance of a truly natural aristocracy,
based on virtue, temperance, independence, and devotion to the commonwealth.
It meant, as John Adams excitedly put it, that in the choice of rulers "Capacity,
Spirit and Zeal in the Cause, supply the Place of Fortune, Family, and every
other Consideration, which used to have Weight with Mankind." The republican
society, said Charles Lee, would still possess "honour, property and
military glories," but they now would "be obtain'd without court
favour, or the rascally talents of servility." Only such an egalitarian
society, declared young John Laurens, the son of the famous Charleston merchant,
could permit "the fullest scope for ambition directed in its proper
channel, in the only channel in which it ought to be allowed, . . . for
the advancement of public good."
Certainly most Revolutionaries had no intention of destroying the gradations
of the social hierarchy by the introduction of republicanism. The Livingstons
of New York, for example, were as acutely conscious of degrees of rank and
as sensitive to the slightest social insult as any family in America; yet,
much to the anger and confusion of William Smith, they took the transformation
to republicanism in stride. Smith in frustration pleaded with them to recognize
the consequences of republicanism: "that there would soon be Land Tax
and no Room for an Aristocracy." But they only laughed at him and predicted
that he would eventually become "a Republican too." Amazingly,
Smith noted, the Livingstons "seemed to be reconciled to every Thing"
that had been done." Yet Smith should have realized that the only aristocrats
the Livingstons expected to see destroyed were those like the De Lanceys
- parasitic sycophants of the Crown. The Livingstons, after all, had always
been true Whigs, the spokesmen for and defenders of the people.
Even the most radical republicans in 1776 admitted the inevitability of
all natural distinctions: weak and strong, wise and foolish - and even of
incidental distinctions: rich and poor, learned and unlearned. Yet, of course,
in a truly republican society the artificial subsidiary distinctions would
never be extreme, not as long as they were based solely on natural distinctions.
It was widely believed that equality of opportunity would necessarily result
in a rough equality of station, that as long as the social channels of ascent
and descent were kept open it would be impossible for any artificial aristocrats
or overgrown rich men to maintain themselves for long. With social movement
founded only on merit, no distinctions could have time to harden. Since,
as Landon Carter said, "Subjects have no Pretence, one more than another,"
republican laws against entail, primogeniture, and in some states, monopolies,
would prevent the perpetuation of privilege and the consequent stifling
of talent." And projected public educational systems would open up
the advantages of learning and advancement to all.
Great consequences were expected to flow from such an egalitarian society.
If every man realized that his associations with other men and the state
depended solely on his merit, then, as former Massachusetts Governor Thomas
Pownall told the Americans, there would be an end to the jealousy and the
contentions for "unequal Dominion" that had beset communities
from time immemorial. Indeed, equality represented the social source from
which the anticipated harmony and public virtue of the New World would flow.
"It is this principle of equality . . ." wrote one Virginian in
1776, "which alone can inspire and preserve the virtue of its members,
by placing them in a relation to the publick and to their fellow-citizens,
which has a tendency to engage the heart and affections to both."
It was a beautiful but ambiguous ideal. The Revolutionaries who hoped for
so much from equality assumed that republican America would be a community
where none would be too rich or too poor, and yet at the same time believed
that men would readily accede to such distinctions as emerged as long as
they were fairly earned. But ironically their ideal contained the sources
of the very bitterness and envy it was designed to eliminate. For if the
promised equality was the kind in which "one should consider himself
as good a man as another, and not be brow beaten or intimidated by riches
or supposed superiority," then their new republican society would be
no different from that in which they had lived, and the Revolution would
have failed to end precisely what it was supposed to end. Indeed, although
few Americans could admit it in 1776, it was the very prevalence of this
ambivalent attitude toward equality that had been at the root of much of
their squabbling during the eighteenth century.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the peculiarities of social development
in the New World had created an extraordinary society, remarkably equal
yet simultaneously unequal, a society so contradictory in its nature that
it left contemporaries puzzled and later historians divided. It was, as
many observers noted, a society strangely in conflict with itself. On one
hand, social distinctions and symbols of status were highly respected and
intensely coveted, indeed, said one witness, even more greedily, than by
the English themselves. Americans, it seemed, were in "one continued
Race: in which everyone is endeavoring to distance all behind him - and
to overtake or pass by, all before him." Yet, on the other hand, Americans
found all of these displays of superiority of status particularly detestable,
in fact "more odious than in any other country." Men in both northern
and southern colonies, but particularly in New England, repeatedly expressed
their disgust with the "certain Airs of Wisdom and superiority"
and the "fribbling Affectation of Politeness," of those groups
and families, particularly those "Insolent minions" Surrounding
the royal governors. "The insults they, without any provocation under
Heaven, offer to every person who passes within their reach, are insufferable."
Such conflict was not simply social; it was often intensely personal: the
simultaneous hunger for and hatred of social pretension and distinction
could be agonizingly combined in the same persons. Although, as Jefferson
later reminded Joel Barlow, "A great deal of the knolege of things
[about the Revolution] is not on paper but only within ourselves,"
some of this personal tension, some of what John Adams called "the
secret Springs of this Surprizing Revolution," was occasionally revealed
in writing. John Dickinson, like Thomas Shippen a generation later, was
thoroughly disgusted with the corrupt and foppish nobility he saw in his
travels abroad; yet at the same time he, like Shippen, "could not forbear
looking on them with veneration." The parvenu minister, Jonathan Mayhew,
who had risen from the wilds of Martha's Vineyard to the richest parish
in Boston, remained throughout his life a tortured man, garishly displaying
his acquired status and boasting of the wealth of his mercantile acquaintances,
while simultaneously defending his rankling social obscurity by preferring
to be the poor son of a good man than the rich son of a sycophant and flatterer.
New England lawyer and a Virginia planter both could fill their diaries
with their private struggles between the attractions and repulsions of the
world of prestige and social refinement. This kind of tension and ambivalence
of attitude, when widespread, made for a painful disjunction of values and
a highly unstable social situation, both of which the ideology of republicanism
was designed to mitigate.
6. WHIG RESENTMENT
The American Revolution was actually many revolutions at once, the product
of a complicated culmination of many diverse personal grievances and social
strains, ranging from land pressures in Connecticut to increasing indebtedness
in Virginia. All the colonies, said John Adams in 1776, "differed in
Religion, Laws, Customs, and Manners, yet in the great Essentials of Society
and Government, they are all alike." What helped to make them alike,
what brought together the various endemic strains and focused them, and
what in fact worked to transform highly unstable local situations into a
continental explosion was the remotely rooted and awkwardly imposed imperial
system. Since the provincial governors, and ultimately the distant authority
of the English Crown, were the principal source of power and prestige in
the society - of preferment and office, of contracts and favors, of support
for Anglican orthodoxy, and even of standards of social and cultural refinement
-they inevitably had become the focal points for both aspiration and dissatisfaction
among the colonists. The resultant political and social divisions were generally
not based on class distinctions; indeed they were fomented by feelings of
similarity, not difference. The Pinckneys and Leighs of South Carolina,
the Carrolls and Dulanys of Maryland, the Livingstons and De Lanceys of
New York, or even the Orises and Hutchinsons of Massachusetts scarcely represented
distinct social classes. Because the various groups and factions were held
together largely by personal and family ties to particular men of influence,
politics was very fractionalized and personal. As Charles Carroll told his
father in 1763: "Tis impossible for all men to be In place, and those
who are out will grumble and strive to thrust themselves in." As long
as politics remained such a highly personal business, essentially involving
bitter rivalry among small elite groups for the rewards of state authority,
wealth, power, and prestige, the Whig distinction between country and court,
legislature and executive, people and rulers, remained a meaningful conception
for describing American politics.
However, despite the elitist nature of American politics, larger interest
groups within the population, both economic and religious, had entered politics
sporadically throughout the eighteenth century to mitigate a specific threat
or need. By the middle of the century there were increasing signs, even
in so stable a colony as Virginia, that more and more groups, with more
broadly based grievances and more deeply rooted interests than those of
the dominating families, were seeking under the prodding of popular spokesmen
a larger share in the wielding of political authority, a process that would
in time work to shape a fundamentally new conception of American politics.
"Family-Interests," like the Livingstons and De Lanceys in New
York, observed Ambrose Serle in 1776, "have been long in a gradual
Decay; and perhaps a new arrangement of political affairs may leave them
wholly extinct." Yet by freezing factional politics ("the Guelphs
and Gibellines") around the issue of British authority, the controversy
with the mother country at first tended to obscure these developments and
to drown out the quarrels Americans had among themselves. British policy
and the Whig ideology worked in tandem to blur America's internal jealousies,
jealousies between North and South, between city and country, and "jealousies
naturally arising from the variety of private interests in the Planter,
the Merchant, and the Mechanic." For a moment in 1774-76 the imperial
contest absorbed and polarized the various differing groups as never before
in the eighteenth century and made the Americans a remarkably united people.
As Lieutenant-Governor William Bull of South Carolina saw, by 1774 the English
government had lost all its power to exploit these different interests by
"design." The best it could do now was to allow "chance"
to "occasion distrust, disunion, confusion, and at last a wish to return
to the old established condition of government." Any hint of British
"design" would only "put the discontented up on their guard,
and prevail on them to suspend any animosities and cement in one common
cause those various interests, which are otherwise very apt to break into
parties and ruin each other." In the minds of revolutionary Whigs the
problem of British authority had become the single problem of colonial politics.
In fact by 1776 the English Crown and the imperial system had come to stand
for all that was wrong with American society.
Hence it seemed entirely credible to the Revolutionaries that the elimination
of this imperial system would decisively change their lives. For too long
America had suffered from a pervasive disorder. Its politics, as Jefferson
indicated in A Summary View, had been repeatedly disrupted by the
wanton interference from abroad, the delaying and negativing of laws for
the benefit of remote and often unknown interests. Indeed, "the single
interposition of an interested individual against a law was scarcely ever
known to fail of 'success, tho' in the opposite scale were placed the interests
of a whole country." For too long had the monarch or governor, as the
sole fountain of honors, offices, and privileges, arbitrarily created social
distinctions, advancing, said John Jay, "needy and ignorant dependants
on great men ... to the seats of justice, and to other places of trust and
importance." But all this, predicted Philip Freneau in 1775, would
soon change.
"The time shall come when strangers rule no more,
Nor cruel mandates vex from Britain's shore."
No longer would a distinguished public office, like that of chief justice
in South Carolina, be filled through the influence of some English lord's
mistress. No longer would the honors of the state be "at the disposal
of a scepter'd knave, thief, fool, or Coward." The exasperating separation
of political and social authority at the highest levels of American life
would at last be ended." Now merit and virtue would alone determine
a man's political position. The rewards of the state would depend only on
a man's contribution to the people, not on whom he knew or on whom he married.
"There is," said John Adams in May of 1776, "something very
unnatural and odious in a Government 1000 Leagues off. An whole Government
of our own Choice, managed by Persons whom We love, revere, and can confide
in, has charms in it for which Men will fight."
Nothing was more despicable to a Commonwealthman than a "Courtier,"
defined as "one who applies himself to the Passions and Prejudices,
the Follies and Vices of Great Men in order to obtain their Smiles, Esteem
and Patronage and consequently their favours and Preferments." And
in the eyes of the Whigs America possessed too many of these "fawning
parasites and cringing courtiers," too much soothing and flattering
of great men - "perhaps the blackest Crimes, that men can commit."
It was these courtiers within the colonies, "whether supported by place
or pension, or only formed to slavish principles by connection and interest,"
declared a Carolinian in 1774, who were "more to be feared than the
arms of Britain herself." Indeed, on the eve of the Revolution it seemed
to some Whigs that the Crown's influence was turning the social world upside
down: "Virtue, Integrity and Ability" had become "the Objects
of the Malice, Hatred and Revenge of the Men in Power," while "folly,
Vice, and Villany" were being everywhere "cherished and supported."
Whatever the social reality prior to the Revolution may have been - and
the evidence indicates that social mobility was considerably lessening -
American Whigs sensed a hardening of the social mold, aggravated by the
influx of new royal officials since 1763. Many, like Charles Carroll of
Maryland, intuitively felt that the avenues to political advancement were
becoming clogged; their Whiggish rhetoric voiced their profound fears that
"all power might center in one family," and that offices of government
"like a precious jewel will be handed down from father to son."
Beneath all the specific constitutional grievances against British authority
lay a more elusive social and political rancor that lent passion to the
Revolutionary movement and without which the Americans' devotion to republicanism
is incomprehensible. The Whigs' language suggest widespread anger and frustration
with the way the relationships of power and esteem seemed to be crystallizing
by the middle of the eighteenth century, under the apparent direction of
the Crown. Among all the grievances voiced against executive power, what
appears to have particularly rankled the colonists, or at least was most
directly confronted in their Whig literature, was the abuse of royal authority
in creating, political and hence social distinctions, the manipulation of
official appointments that enabled those creatures with the proper connections,
those filled with the most flattery, those "miniature infinitessimal
Deities" John Adams called them, to leap ahead of those equally - if
not better-qualified into lucrative positions of power and prestige. As
one Whig recorder of American complaints charged, too many "improper
men, from sinister designs, because of family connexions, and to serve a
turn, have been chose, put into, or continued in places of trust or power,"
while too many "proper ones have been opposed and kept out, . . . because
they would not be so the slaves of a party." The American Whig spirit,
said George Clinton, who knew what he was speaking of, was a "Spirit
of Resentment," an angry hatred of pretentious sycophants who strutted
in display of a social superiority nobody believed they deserved."
American writings, in both North and South, were filled with outcries against
the "insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit" had
to bear at the hands of the "unworthy" who sought "to lord
it over all the rest." "None of us, when we grow old," South
Carolinians complained bitterly to Josiah Quincy in 1773, "can expect
the honours of the State - they are all given away to worthless poor rascals."
Young James Otis was incensed by the dignities and grandeur awarded to those
in government who had, he said, "no natural or divine right to be above
me." John Adams's fury with Thomas Hutchinson knew no bounds: the Hutchinson
clan had absorbed almost all the honors and profits of the province - "to
the Exclusion of much better Men." Even ten years after the Revolution
Americans could not forget how the diffusion of royal authority had affected
their social structure: "Every twentieth cousin of an ale-house-keeper
who had a right of voting in the election of a member of Parliament,"
recalled John Gardiner in a Fourth of July oration in 1785, "was cooked
up into a gentleman, and sent out here, commissioned to insult the hand
that gave him daily bread."
William Livingston (about whom John Adams once said there was "nothing
elegant or genteel") in one of his typically brilliant satires explored
the sense of political and social deprivation that lay behind the bitterness
of many of the Whigs. Posing as a befuddled Tory, Livingston exposed the
personal meaning republican equality possessed for Americans, and he showed
as well how little fear most Whigs had of the social forces they were unleashing.
Whatever doubts they may have had were smothered in their resentment of
what was felt to be an unmerited aristocracy.
Livingston's Tory was confused: "That the vulgar should be flattered
by our muggletonian, tatterdemalion governments, is not to be wondered at,
considering into what importance those whimsical raggamuffin constitutions
have elevated the heretofore dispicable and insignificant mobility."
But he was
astonished that men of fashion and
spirit should prefer our hotchpotch, oliverian, oligargical anarchies, to
the beautiful, the constitutional, the jure divino, and the heaven-descended
monarchy of Britain. For pray how are the better sort amidst our universal
levelism, to get into offices? During the halcyon days of royalty and loyalty,
if a gentleman was only blessed with a handsome wife or daughter, or would
take the trouble of informing the ministry of the disaffection of the colonies,
suggesting at the same time the most proper measures for reducing them to
parliamentary submission .... he was instantly rewarded with some lucrative
appointment, his own disqualifications and the maledictions of the rabble
notwithstanding. But how is a gentleman of family, who is always entitled
to a fortune, to be promoted to a post of profit, or station of eminence
in these times of unsubordination and fifth monarchyism? Why, he must deport
himself like a man of virtue and honor.... He must moreover pretend to be
a patriot, and to love his country, and he must consequently be a hypocrite,
and act under perpetual restraint, or he is detected and discarded with
infamy. Besides ... the comparative scarcity of offices themselves ... must
make every man of laudable ambition eternally regret our revolt from the
mother country: For the present governments being manufactured by the populace,
who have worked themselves into a pursuasion of I know not what, of public
weal and public virtue, and the interest of one's country, it has been ridiculously
imagined that there ought to be no more offices in a state than are absolutely
requisite for what these deluded creatures call the benefit of the commonwealth.
Under the old constitution, on the contrary, whenever the crown was graciously
disposed to oblige a gentleman, . . . an office was instantly invented for
the purpose; and both land and water, earth and sea should be ransacked,
but his Majesty would create a Surveyor of Woods and a Sounder of Coasts.
Thus every humble suitor who had a proper introduction was always sure of
being genteely provided for, without either consulting a mob, or losing
time about the wild chimera of public utility.
Furthermore, continued Livingston's distraught Tory, America had lost more
than offices by separating from Great Britain. No longer could atheism flourish
-, no longer could women wear their three-foot hats. America had crudely
cut off the influx of gallantry and politeness from the Court of London.
While we received our governors and other principal officers immediately
from the fountain-head of high life and polish'd manners, it was impossible
for us to degenerate into our primitive clownishness and rusticity. But
these being now unfortunately excluded, we shall gradually reimmerse into
plain hospitality, and downright honest sincerity; than which nothing can
be more insipid to a man of breeding and politesse.
What was felt by a Livingston, an Adams, or a Carroll at the uppermost levels
of American society could be experienced as well throughout varying layers
of the social structure, all generally concentrated by 1776, however, into
a common detestation of the English imperial system. Thus a justice of the
peace or militia officer in some small western New England town, or a petty
Virginia rum merchant with a government permit, both far removed from and
ignorant of the forces at work in Whitehall, could awake in the heat of
the crisis to find himself labeled a parasitic tool of the Crown, the object
of long-suffering and varied local resentments." Whatever the actual
responsibility of royal authority for the dissatisfactions and frustrations
in American society, by 1776 the English Crown had come to bear the full
load, and men could believe, although surely not with the same vividness
as John Adams, that the whole royal juggernaut was designed to crush them
personally." The Crown had become, in a word, a scapegoat for a myriad
of American ills.