the wilderness, felling the vast forests, hunting the wild game and still
wilder red men, has often been given as a cause of the Revolution and the
American love of independence. Eloquence is easily tempted to enlarge
upon such causes, and to describe in romantic language the hunter and the
woodsman, the farmer in the fresh soil of primeval forests, the fishermen
of the Grand Banks, the merchants and sailors who traded with the whole
world in defiance of the British navigation laws, and the crews of the
whaling ships that pursued their dangerous game from the equator to the
poles.
The American lawyers, according to Burke, were an important cause of the
Revolution. They were very numerous in the colonies; law and theories of
government were much read and studied, and the people were trained to
discussion of political rights as well as of religious doctrine. Burke
described in picturesque detail how, in the South, the ruling class
lived scattered and remote from one another, maintaining themselves
in self-reliant authority on plantations with hundreds of slaves;
and slavery, he said, inspired in the white master a fierce love of
independence for himself and an undying dread of any form of the bondage
which his love of gain had inflicted on a weaker race.
The geographical position of the thirteen contiguous colonies, so
situated that they could easily unite and act together, and having a
population that was increasing so rapidly that it seemed likely in a few
years to exceed the population of England, was possibly a more effective
cause of the Revolution than any of those that have been named. The
consciousness of possessing such a vast fertile continent, which within a
few generations would support more than double the population of little
England, furnished a profound encouragement for theories of independence.
People in England were well aware of this feeling in the colonies, and
Joshua Gee, a popular writer on political economy in 1738, tried to
quiet their fears. Some, he said, were objecting that “if we encourage
the Plantations they will grow rich and set up for themselves and cast
off the English government”; and he went on to show that this fear was
groundless because the colonists nearly all lived on the navigable rivers
and bays of America, where the British navy could easily reach and subdue
them. He also attempted to argue away the advantage of the contiguous
situation of the colonies and described them as split up into a dozen
or more separate provinces, each with its own governor; and it was
inconceivable, he said, that such diverse communities would be able to
unite against England.
English statesmen, however, saw the danger of union among the colonies
long before the outbreak of the Revolution; and they shrewdly rejected
the plan of union of the Albany conference of 1754; and in the Revolution
itself a large part of England’s diplomatic and military efforts were
directed towards breaking up the easy communication among the colonies.
In modern times England’s colonies have been widely separated from one
another. There has been no large and rapidly increasing white population
on contiguous territory with ability for union. The dark-skinned
population of India is enormous in numbers, but incapable of the united
action of the Americans of 1776, and India is not considered a colony but
a territory continuously held by overwhelming military force. Instead of
a colonial population which threatened in a short time to outnumber her
own people, England’s power and population have, in modern times, grown
far beyond any power or population in her well-scattered white colonies.
The colonists at the time of the Revolution have often been described
as speaking of England as home and regarding the mother-country with no
little degree of affection; and while there is no doubt some truth in
this, especially as regards the people who were loyalists, yet a very
large proportion of the colonists had become totally differentiated from
the people of England. This was the inevitable result of having lived for
over a hundred years in the American environment. They were no longer
Englishmen. They had become completely Americanized. Certain classes
kept up their connection with England, and many of the rich planters of
the South sent their sons to England to be educated. But a very large
part of the colonists, especially in the older settled provinces, like
Massachusetts and Virginia, had forgotten England and were another people.
Instead of speaking, as novelists often describe them, in a formal
archaic way, using quaint phrases of old English life, the colonists
spoke with mannerisms and colloquial slang which were peculiarly
American. These peculiarities were ridiculed by Englishmen of the time
and formed part of Grant’s famous speech in Parliament, the burden
of which appears to have been that the colonists had become entirely
different from English people, and Grant is said to have given imitations
of what he considered their strange speech and manners. Mrs. Knight, in
her _Journal of Travel from Boston to New York_, had, many years before
the Revolution, given specimens of this difference; and the language of
the New Englanders which she describes was certainly not like anything in
England.
“Law for me—what in the world brings you here at this time of night? I
never see a woman on the Rode so Dreadful late in all the days of my
versall life. Who are you? Where are you going?”—Mrs. Knight’s _Journal_,
p. 23.
In 1775 some one wrote a set of humorous verses, said to have been the
original Yankee Doodle song, to illustrate the colloquial Americanism of
the time. “Slapping” was used for “large,” as in the phrase “a slapping
stallion.” “Nation” was used for “a great deal,” as in such a phrase as
“only a nation louder.” “Tarnal” was used for “very.” “I see” was used
for “I saw,” “I come” for “I came,” and “I hooked it off” in place of “I
went away.”
Not only did the patriots feel themselves to be quite different from
Englishmen, but they had a consciousness of ability and power, the result
of having governed themselves so long in their towns, counties, and
provinces, and of having carried on a commerce of their own in defiance
of the English navigation laws. They felt that they, not Englishmen, had
created the country; and they had a resolute intention to develop its
future greatness in their own way without the advice of aliens across
three thousand miles of ocean.
This high confidence, which was a conspicuous motive in the patriot
party, was always ridiculed by the loyalists as mere bumptiousness and
conceit. It was difficult for a loyalist to understand how any one could
seriously put himself in opposition to the British empire or want any
form of government except the British constitution. But the patriot
estimate of their own ability was by no means an exaggeration. They
could be overcome, of course, as the Boer republics and other peoples
have been overcome, by the superior numbers or wealth of Great Britain.
But the history of the Revolution disclosed qualities in which the
Americans notoriously excelled Europeans as well as the Anglo-Saxon stock
in England from which they were derived. They were of keener practical
intelligence, more promptness in action, more untiring energy, more
originality in enterprise, better courage and endurance, and more natural
military skill among the rank and file. These distinctively American
qualities, we now call them, seem to have been much more in evidence
among the patriot party than among the loyalists.
Every circumstance of their past and every consideration of their
present convinced the patriot of the infinite pleasure and value of home
rule and they had codified their opinions into a political philosophy
which not only justified their semi-independence and disregard of
acts of Parliament, but would also justify them in breaking off from
England, at the first opportunity and becoming absolutely independent.
They had gathered this philosophy from the works of certain European
writers—Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu,
and others—who had applied to politics and government the doctrines
of religious liberty and the right of private judgment which had been
developed by the Reformation. Being such extreme Protestants, and having
carried so far the religious ideas of the Reformation, the colonists
naturally accepted in their fullest meaning the political principles
of the Reformation. If we are looking for profound influences in the
Revolution, it would be difficult to find any that were stronger than two
of the writers just mentioned, Locke and Burlamaqui, whose books had a
vast effect in the break-up of the British empire which we are about to
record.
Beginning with Grotius, who was born in 1582, and ending with
Montesquieu, who died in 1755, the writers mentioned covered a period
of about two hundred years of political investigation, thought and
experience. In fact, they covered the period since the Reformation. They
represented the effect of the Reformation on political thought. They
represented also all those nations whose opinions on such subjects were
worth anything. Grotius was a Dutchman, Puffendorf a German, Locke an
Englishman, Burlamaqui an Italian Swiss, and Montesquieu a Frenchman.
Hooker, who lived from 1553 to 1600, and whom Locke cites so freely,
might be included in the number, and that would make the period quite
two hundred years. Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” declared very
emphatically that governments could not be legitimate unless they rested
on the consent of the governed; and this principle forms the foundation
of Locke’s famous essays.
There were, of course, other minor writers; and the colonists relied
upon them all; but seldom troubled themselves to read the works of the
earlier ones, or to read Hutchinson, Clarke and other followers of that
school, because Locke, Burlamaqui, and Beccaria had summarized them
all and brought them down to date. To this day any one going to the
Philadelphia Library, and asking for No. 77, can take in his hands the
identical, well-worn volume of Burlamaqui which delegates to the Congress
and many an unsettled Philadelphian read with earnest, anxious minds. It
was among the first books that the library had obtained; and perhaps the
most important and effective book it has ever owned.
The rebellious colonists also read Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government”
with much profit and satisfaction to themselves. Locke was an extreme
Whig, an English revolutionist of the school of 1688. Before that great
event, he had been unendurable to the royalists, who were in power, and
had been obliged to spend a large part of his time on the continent.
In the preface of his “Two Treatises,” he says that they will show how
entirely legitimate is the title of William III to the throne, because
it is established on the consent of the people. That is the burden of
his whole argument—the consent of the people as the only true foundation
of government. That principle sank so deep into the minds of the patriot
colonists that it was the foundation of all their political thought, and
became an essentially American idea.
Beccaria, who, like Burlamaqui, was an Italian, also exercised great
influence on the colonists. His famous book, “Crimes and Punishments,”
was also a short, concise, but very eloquent volume. It caused a great
stir in the world. The translation circulated in America had added to it
a characteristic commentary by Voltaire. Beccaria, though not writing
directly on the subject of liberty, necessarily included that subject,
because he dealt with the administration of the criminal law. His plea
for more humane and just punishments, and for punishments more in
proportion to the offense, found a ready sympathy among the Americans,
who had already revolted in disgust from the brutality and extravagant
cruelty of the English criminal code.
But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential
principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that “every act of
authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute
necessity is tyrannical,” made a most profound impression in America.
He laid down also the principle that “in every human society there is
an effort continually tending to confer on one part the highest power
and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and
misery.” That sentence became the life-long guide of many Americans. It
became a constituent part of the minds of Jefferson and Hamilton. It can
be seen as the foundation, the connecting strand, running all through
the essays of the _Federalist_. It was the inspiration of the “checks
and balances” in the national Constitution. It can be traced in American
thought and legislation down to the present time.
Burlamaqui’s book, devoted exclusively to the subject of liberty and
independence, is still one of the best expositions of the true doctrines
of natural law, or the rights of man. At the time of the Revolution these
rights of man were often spoken of as our rights as men, which is a very
descriptive phrase, because the essence of those rights is political
manhood, honorable self-reliance as opposed to degenerate dependence.
Burlamaqui belonged to a Protestant family that had once lived at
Lucca, Italy; but had been compelled, like the family of Turretini, and
many others, to take refuge in Switzerland. He became a professor at
Geneva, which gave him the reputation of a learned man. He also became
a counselor of state and was noted for his practical sagacity. He had
intended to write a great work in many volumes on the subject to which
he had devoted so much of his life, “The Principles of Natural Law,” as
it was then called. Ill health preventing such a huge task, he prepared
a single volume, which he said was only for beginners and students,
because it dealt with the bare elements of the science in the simplest
and plainest language.
This little book was translated into English in 1748, and contained
only three hundred pages; but in that small space of large, clear type,
Burlamaqui compressed everything that the patriot colonists wanted to
know. He was remarkably clear and concise, and gave the Americans the
qualities of the Italian mind at its best. He aroused them by his modern
glowing thought and his enthusiasm for progress and liberty. His handy
little volume was vastly more effective and far-reaching than would have
been the blunderbuss he had intended to load to the muzzle.
If we examine the volumes of Burlamaqui’s predecessors, Grotius,
Puffendorf, and the others, we find their statements about natural law
and our rights as men rather brief, vague, and general, as is usual with
the old writers on any science. Burlamaqui brought them down to date,
developed their principles, and swept in the results of all the thought
and criticism since their day.
The term natural law, which all these writers used, has long since gone
out of fashion. They used it because, inspired by the Reformation, they
were struggling to get away from the arbitrary system, the artificial
scholasticism, the despotism of the middle ages. They were seeking to
obtain for law and government a foundation which should grow out of the
nature of things, the common facts of life that everybody understood.
They sought a system that, being natural, would become established and
eternal like nature; a system that would displace that thing of the
middle ages which they detested, and called “arbitrary institution.”
Let us, they said, contemplate for a time man as he is in himself, the
natural man, his wants and requirements.
“The only way,” said Burlamaqui, “to attain to the knowledge of that
natural law is to consider attentively the nature and constitution of
man, the relations he has to the beings that surround him, and the states
from thence resulting. In fact, the very term of natural law and the
notion we have given of it, show that the principles of this science must
be taken from the very nature and constitution of man.”
Men naturally, he said, draw together to form societies for mutual
protection and advantage. Their natural state is a state of union and
society, and these societies are merely for the common advantage of all
of the members.
This was certainly a very simple proposition, but it had required
centuries to bring men’s minds back to it; and it was not altogether
safe to put forth because it implied that each community existed for
the benefit of itself, for the benefit of its members, and not for the
benefit of a prince or another nation, or for the church, or for an
empire.
It was a principle quickly seized upon by the Americans as soon as their
difficulties began in 1764. In their early debates and discussions we
hear a great deal about a “state of nature,” which at first seems rather
meaningless to us. But it was merely their attempt to apply to themselves
the fundamental principles of the Reformation. Were the colonies by the
exactions and remodeling of the mother-country thrown into that “state
of nature,” where they could reorganize society afresh, on the basis
of their own advantage? How much severity or how much oppression or
dissatisfaction would bring about this state of nature? Was there any
positive rule by which you could decide? Patrick Henry, who was always
very eloquent on the subject, declared that the boundary had been passed;
that the colonies were in a state of nature.
Any one who is at all familiar with the trend of thought for the last
hundred years can readily see how closely this idea of going back to
natural causes and first conceptions for the discovery of political
principles is allied to every kind of modern progress; to the modern
study of natural history, the study of the plants and animals in their
natural environment, instead of by preconceived scholastic theories; the
study of the human body by dissection instead of by supposition; the
study of heat, light, electricity, the soil, the rocks, the ocean, the
stars by actual observation, without regard to what the Scriptures and
learned commentators had to say.
A large part of the American colonists were very far advanced in all the
ideas of the Reformation. Burlamaqui’s book, applying to politics and
government, these free and wonderful principles, came to a large number
of them as the most soul-stirring and mind-arousing message they had ever
heard. It has all become trite enough to us; but to them it was fresh and
marvelous. Their imaginations seized on it with the indomitable energy
and passion which the climate inspired, and some who breathed the air of
Virginia and Massachusetts were on fire with enthusiasm.
“This state of nature,” argued Burlamaqui, “is not the work of man, but
established by divine institution.”
“Natural society is a state of equality and liberty; a state in which all
men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other
power but God. For every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to
his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another
person’s authority by a particular convention.”
Here we find coupled with liberty that word equality which played such a
tremendous part in history for the succeeding hundred years. And we must
bear in mind that what the people of that time meant by it was political
equality, equality of rights, equality before the law and the government;
and not equality of ability, talents, fortunes, or gifts, as some have
fancied.
Burlamaqui not only found liberty, independence, and equality growing
out of nature itself; but he argued that all this was part of the divine
plan, the great order of nature and the universe. Indeed, that was what
he and his Reformation predecessors had set out to discover, to unravel
the system of humanity, to see if there really was a system that could
be gathered from the actual plain facts; and to see also if there was a
unity and completeness in this system.
“The human understanding,” he says, “is naturally right, and has within
itself a strength sufficient to arrive at the knowledge of truth, and
to distinguish it from error.” That he announces as the fundamental
principle of his book, “the hinge whereon the whole system of humanity
turns,” and it was simply his way of restating the great doctrine of the
Reformation, the right of private judgment.
But he goes on to enlarge on it in a way particularly pleasing to
the patriot colonists, for he says we have this power to decide for
ourselves, “especially in things wherein our respective duties are
concerned.”
“Yes,” said the colonists, “we have often thought that we were the best
judges of all our own affairs.”
“Those who feel,” said Franklin, in his examination before Parliament,
“can best judge.”
The daring Burlamaqui went on to show that liberty instead of being, as
some supposed, a privilege to be graciously accorded, was in reality a
universal right, inherent in the nature of things.
Then appears that idea common to the great leaders of thought in that
age, that man’s true purpose in the world is the pursuit of happiness.
To this pursuit, they said, every human being has a complete right. It
was part of liberty; a necessary consequence of liberty. This principle
of the right to pursue happiness, which is merely another way of stating
the right of self-development, has played as great a part in subsequent
history as equality. It is one of the foundation principles of the
Declaration of Independence. It is given there as the ground-work of
the right of revolution, the right of a people to throw off or destroy
a power which interferes with this great pursuit, “and to institute a
new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing
its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
safety and happiness.”
It has been interpreted in all sorts of ways—as the right to improve
your condition, to develop your talents, to grow rich, or to rise into
the class of society above you. It is now in its broadest meaning so
axiomatic in this country that Americans can hardly realize that it was
ever disputed.
But it was, and still is, disputed in England and on the continent. Even
so liberal an Englishman as Kingsley resented with indignation the charge
that he favored the aspiration of the lower classes to change their
condition. Once a cobbler, remain a cobbler, and be content to be a good
cobbler. In other words, the righteousness which he so loudly professed
was intended to exalt certain fortunate individuals, and not to advance
society.
This desire and pursuit of happiness being part of nature, or part of the
system of Providence, and as essential to every man and as inseparable
from him as his reason, it should be freely allowed him, and not
repressed. This, Burlamaqui declares, is a great principle, “the key of
the human system,” opening to vast consequences for the world.
The consequences have certainly been vaster than he dreamed of. Millions
of people now live their daily life in the sunshine of this doctrine.
Millions have fled to us from Europe to seek its protection. Not only
the whole American system of laws, but whole philosophies and codes
of conduct have grown up under it. The abolitionists appealed to it,
and freed six millions of slaves. The transcendental philosophy of New
England, that extreme and beautiful attempt to develop conscience,
nobility, and character from within; that call of the great writers like
Lowell to every humble individual to stand by his own personality, fear
it not, advance it by its own lines; even our education, the elective
system of our colleges—all these things have followed under that “pursuit
of happiness,” which the patriot colonists seized upon so gladly in 1765
and enshrined in their Declaration of Independence in 1776.