THE REVOLUTION IN 1776.
Revolt from aristocracy and detestation of “caste” in politics, in
religion, and in society, have been the key-notes of the whole history
of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. They were the incentives that first
led men of that race to seek homes beyond the Atlantic, and have ever
been the cardinal principles of the nation those pioneers founded.
The westward movement began with that era of English history marked by
the intolerable pretensions, in matters both of Church and State, of
the Stuart monarchs. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” which
cost Charles I. his head, was, with all that it meant, the grievance
that drove from England the settlers of the American colonies.
When James I., soon after his accession, was petitioned to allow
liberty of assembling and of discussion to all classes and sects of his
subjects, he replied that such a privilege “agrees with monarchy as
well as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall
meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our
proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say: ‘It must be thus;’ then
Dick shall reply and say: ‘Nay, marry, but we will have it thus;’ and,
therefore, here I must say: ‘The king forbids.’”
The king forbade, but the native spirit of English liberty did not
acquiesce without a murmur. There were mutterings of the storm that
was to burst upon his son and successor in the full fury of rebellion.
The subservient Wentworth complained that “the very genius of this
nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and
ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”
Most outspoken in opposition to royal encroachment were the
Puritans--those stern disciples of Calvin, who had furnished England
her first Protestant martyrs, Hooper and Rogers, and who, in the early
seventeenth century, were, as Hallam says, “the depositories of the
sacred fire of liberty.”
Many Puritans preferred to leave their native country rather than
submit. In 1607, a company of them were about to take sail for Holland
from the Humber, when they were arrested and forced to return to their
homes. In the following spring, they again attempted to escape. They
reached the Lincolnshire coast, and were embarking, when soldiers, who
had been dispatched in pursuit, rode down to the shore, and seized some
of the women and children. As the only fault of these prisoners was
that they had followed their husbands and fathers, they were afterward
released.
The fugitives, whose leaders were John Robinson, their minister, and
William Brewster, their ruling elder, first tarried at Amsterdam, and
the next year settled at Leyden. There they lived for eleven years--a
body of exiles, who did not fraternize with their Dutch neighbors, and
who gradually formed a plan of migrating to the new country beyond the
Atlantic, where they might be under their old flag, and yet hope for
civil and religious liberty.
In 1617, they sent two of their number to England, to secure for their
project the consent of the London Company, to which James I. had
granted proprietary rights over Virginia--then the general name of the
North American coast. The two embassies received a permit, although
they put no great trust in it. “If,” said they, “there should afterward
be a purpose to wrong us, though we had a seal as broad as the house
floor, there would be means enough found to recall or reverse.” They
did not foresee their future strength against oppression.
Thus it was that in the August of 1620 the Pilgrims set sail from Delft
Haven, and in November landed on the shores of Massachusetts--forty-one
families, numbering in all a hundred and two souls. Before they
landed, they signed a mutual agreement, covenanting “to enact,
constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought
most convenient for the general good of the colony.” The agreement
was loyally kept in the face of hardship and danger from within and
without. The colony they planted grew in the spirit of popular liberty
as it grew from penury to prosperity.
Bancroft remarks that “in the early history of the United States,
popular assemblies burst everywhere into life, with a consciousness of
their importance and immediate efficiency.” This development of freedom
was attained in Virginia even earlier than in Massachusetts.
Virginia’s first struggle against usurping pretension was in 1624,
when James I. sent out royal commissioners with orders “to enquire
into the state of the plantation.” The colonists protested against the
commissioners’ proposal of absolute governors, and demanded the liberty
of their Assembly; “for nothing,” they said, “can conduce more to the
public satisfaction and public utility.” And the Assembly succeeded in
retaining its rights.
Thirty years later, a domestic attempt at usurpation was met with equal
firmness. Samuel Cotton, the elected governor of the colony, had a
quarrel with the Assembly, and arbitrarily proclaimed it dissolved.
The representative defied his authority, and speedily forced him to
yield. For even in that colony in America, where existed more of the
inclination to class distinction than in many other of the colonies,
the same spirit of hatred to “caste,” and the exercise of any assumed
superiority was deep-rooted, and thus early gave evidence of its
presence.
At the foundation of Virginia’s sister colony of Maryland, the king
expressly covenanted that neither he nor his successors would lay any
imposition, custom, or tax upon the inhabitants of the province. The
proprietors had the right to establish a colonial aristocracy, but
it was never exercised. “Feudal institutions,” says Bancroft, “could
not be perpetuated in the lands of their origin, far less renew their
youth in America. Sooner might the oldest oaks in Windsor forest be
transplanted across the Atlantic, than antiquated social forms. The
seeds of popular liberty, contained in the charter, would find in the
New World the soil best suited to quicken them.” One of the early acts
of the Provincial Assembly of Maryland was the framing of a declaration
of rights. And yet, it was in Baltimore, the metropolis of the State
of Maryland, that the first resistance was offered to the soldiers of
the people, who were going to enforce the will of the majority upon the
minority. Maryland, while, from proximity to the Federal capital, was
less inclined toward the secession movement, was still sufficiently
influenced by the aristocratic slave-holding part of her population
as to be the scene of the first actual resistance to the will of the
people in 1861.
The same spirit animated the pioneers of Connecticut, where Hooker
declared that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent
of the people.” When John Clark and William Coddington founded the
settlement of Newport, it was “unanimously agreed upon” among their
people that the body politic should be “a _Democracie_ or popular
government.” The colonization of Pennsylvania--“the holy experiment,”
as Penn called it--was inaugurated by its great leader with a solemn
pledge of “liberty of conscience and civil freedom.” And similar
incidents accompanied the birth of nearly every new colony.
As Massachusetts grew to be the most prosperous of the northern
colonies, she “echoed the voice of Virginia like deep calling unto
deep. The State was filled with the hum of village politicians; the
freemen of every town on the Bay were busily inquiring into their
liberties and privileges.” [Bancroft.] The American spirit, which was
to leaven the world with a new ideal of liberty, found its philosophers
and statesmen in the farms and hamlets of the young and simple
community. It found, of course, its critics and its doubters. Lechford,
a Boston lawyer, prophesied that “elections cannot be safe long here,”
where manhood suffrage was the rule. John Cotton spoke against the
accepted principle of rotation in office; but neither could stem the
current of democratic doctrine, because the early settlers of America
still retained the scars of their recent conflict with the aristocrats
of Europe. Their arrival in the then wilderness of America had been too
recent to obliterate the impression made on their minds by “caste” in
Europe.
In 1635, there was a short-lived possibility that the aristocratic
system of Britain might be transplanted to Massachusetts. Henry Vane,
younger son of a titled English family, emigrated to the colony, where
he was kindly received, and elected governor a few years after; and two
noblemen, Lord Brooke and Lord Say-and-Seal, expressed their intention
to follow him if the colonists would agree to establish a second
chamber of their legislature and constitute them hereditary members of
it. But the burgesses, easily perceiving the trend of such a proposal,
declined it, courteously but decidedly.
Aristocracy never found a foothold in any of the colonies. The only
approach to it was the privileges accorded in some of them to the
“proprietors,” and these were, while they lasted, regarded with some
jealousy. For instance, when Pennsylvania, after Braddock’s defeat at
Fort Duquesne, decided to raise £50,000 for self-defence by an estate
tax, the proprietors--heirs of William Penn--claimed exemption from
the levy; but, though Governor Morris approved the claim, the Assembly
refused it.
Bancroft thus characterizes the elemental beginnings of the American
nation: “Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people,
separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization;
the people, self-confident and industrious; the people, wise by all
traditions that favored its culture and happiness--alone broke away
from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations
of our Republic.” And periodically, as we see from the records of
our nation, the might of the majority has been exercised to suppress
anything like the attempted institution of “caste” in our country. This
often-recurring crime begins to upraise its head, slowly at first,
after each defeat, but eventually its growth becomes sufficiently great
to attract the attention of the “Common People,” and, as a result,
receives its punishment, so justly due.
And the same historian adds: “Of the nations of Europe, the chief
emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of
personal independence. The immense majority of American families were
not of ‘the high folk of Normandie,’ but were of ‘the low men,’ who
were Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the South.”
It is true of the South, in spite of the fact--influential throughout
the history of that section--that its population contained an element
drawn from the wealthier classes of the mother country. It has indeed
been said that Virginia was “a continuation of English society.”
The seeds of privilege may have existed in the Old Dominion, but,
nevertheless, in no colony was the spirit of personal independence
more signally evinced. “With consistent firmness of character,” to
quote again from Bancroft, “the Virginians welcomed representative
assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; rebelled against the
politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles that
prevailed in their forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of
the age at the polls.”
With the aims of the English rebellion against Charles I., the American
colonies were in full sympathy. Immediately after its outbreak, the
general court of Massachusetts directed the governor to omit the oath
of allegiance to the king, “seeing that he had violated the privileges
of Parliament.” But the civil war had no effect upon the colonial
governments. In England, the monarchy, the peerage, and the prelacy
were at swords’ points with the people; in America, there was neither
peerage nor prelacy, and monarchy was rendered remote by the Atlantic,
so that there were no two parties to join battle.
The Restoration opened a new era in the history of the colonies--a
period of conflict between royal usurpation and aristocratic oppression
on the one hand, and popular liberties on the other; a period that,
after many years of difficulty and struggle, culminated in events that
gave rationality and independence to the greatest democracy the world
has ever seen.
It was a period marked in England by the political ascendency of the
aristocracy. At the Restoration, the nobility resumed possession of
the hereditary branch of the Parliament. Through their influence
over elections, they, to a great extent, controlled the House of
Commons--and through it the crown, over which the Commons had given
recent and striking proofs of power. It was the aristocratic element
that dictated the policy which goaded the colonies into secession from
the mother country. It supplied the office-holders--“carpet-baggers”
they might have been termed in modern political slang--whom the home
government quartered upon the colonials by an official system tainted
with nepotism and corruption. Its foe--Pitt, the great Commoner--was
the friend of America, and one of her few champions in Parliament.
Equally the friend of America was the English democracy--politically
far less powerful during the century after the Restoration than in the
preceding and the subsequent periods. When the hated Stamp Act was
repealed, the “Common People” of London lit bonfires and illuminated
the streets, rang the historic Bow Bells, and decked the shipping in
the Thames with flags.
But the House of Commons, before whom came the critical measures of
legislation for the colonies, reflected the feeling of the aristocracy
and not that of the populace. “The majority,” said a member, during
a debate on American affairs in 1770, “is no better than an ignorant
multitude.” Sir George Saville, a man of rare independence and
integrity, replied in strong words. “The greatest evil that can befall
this nation,” he declared, “is the invasion of the people’s rights by
the authority of this house. I do not say that the members have sold
the rights of their constituents; but I do say, I have said, and I
shall always say, that they have betrayed them.” But his protest was
shouted down as treason, and Parliament blindly pursued its course of
usurpation.
Long before that time, there had been in America thoughts of
independence as a refuge from usurpation. The colonists cherished a
genuine loyalty to the old flag, and a strong pride in the Saxon
blood, whose latest and, indeed, most typical product they themselves
were. Yet, as far back as 1638, when Charles I. tried to revoke
the original patent of Massachusetts, the settlers threatened to
“confederate themselves under a new government for their necessary
safety and subsistence.”
In 1698, Governor Nicholson, of Virginia, reported that “a great many
in the plantations think that no law of England ought to be in force
and binding upon them without their own consent.” Three years later, a
public document noted that “the independence the colonies thirst after
is now notorious.”
The sentiment grew gradually during the reigns of the Georges, slowly
overcoming the strength of the old attachment to the mother country.
Every encroachment attempted by royalty or officialism aroused a
hostility that reinforced the spirit of liberty. For instance, when
Samuel Shute, Governor of Massachusetts in 1719, tried to prevent the
publication of the Assembly’s answer to one of his speeches, claiming
power over the press as his prerogative, he only succeeded in evoking a
vigorous resistance, that finally disposed of his pretension, and gave
the press untrammeled freedom.
And thus it was that a generation later the patriotic Otis, of Boston,
the man “who dared to love his country and be poor,” spoke so boldly
in reply to Hutchinson, who summed up his aristocratic preferences in
the odious Horatian maxim, _Odi profanum vulgus_, and who avowed his
dissatisfaction that “liberty and property should be enjoyed by the
vulgar.”
“God made all men naturally equal,” said Otis. “The ideas of earthly
grandeur are acquired, not innate. No government has a right to make
a slave of the subject.” And again, “to bring the powers of all into
the hands of one or some few, and to make them hereditary, is the
interested work of the weak and wicked.”
Such was the philosophy that was daily preached among the burghers of
Boston. Such was the doctrine that Patrick Henry came from the Virginia
backwoods to voice with his burning eloquence. Such was the spirit that
was everywhere animating the colonies, while Parliament enacted one
unjust and oppressive law after another. “The sun of American liberty
has set,” Ben Franklin wrote from Europe to a friend in America, when
he heard of the enactment of the ill-fated Stamp Act; “now we must
light the torches of industry and economy.” “Be assured that we shall
light torches of another sort,” replied his friend.
The torches were lit; they blazed forth in the shots fired at
Lexington, and on Bunker Hill, and in the Declaration of Independence,
at Philadelphia; and they were not put out until Parliamentary
oppression had been forever ended, and a new nation--a plebeian
democracy--took its place by the side of the proudest of earth’s
empires.
The war was fought and won by the “Common People,” in the face of the
armed force of the foreigner, and the treachery, active or passive,
of not a few colonists, whose aristocratic connections or pretensions
held them aloof from the movement for liberty. Even in the darkest
days of the struggle, when Washington, driven from New York, was
retreating before Howe’s advance, and many men of prominence were
giving up the patriotic cause as hopeless--Joseph Galloway and Andrew
Allen, of Pennsylvania, Samuel Tucker, of New Jersey, John Dickinson,
of Delaware, and others--even then the Commander’s wonderful faith and
courage was reflected in the fidelity of the populace. That alone made
possible the final triumph.
“When the war of independence was terminated,” remarks DeTocqueville,
in his famous study of “Democracy in America,” “and the foundations
of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided
between two opinions--two opinions which are as old as the world, and
which are perpetually to be met with under different forms and various
names, in all free communities--the one tending to limit, the other to
extend, indefinitely, the power of the people. The conflict between
these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in America
which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. Both parties were agreed
on the most essential points, and neither of them had to destroy an
old constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order
to triumph. In neither of them, consequently, were a great number of
private interests affected by success or defeat; but moral principles
of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence,
were concerned in the struggle, and these sufficed to kindle violent
passions.”
The party that sought to limit the power of the people was that of
the Federalists; its opponents took the name of Republican, which
afterwards became Democratic-Republican, and finally, under Andrew
Jackson, Democratic. In view of the fixed bent of the American national
character, it is not difficult to discern the inevitable result of the
conflict between them. The Federalists were certain to be ultimately
overcome. America is the land of democracy, and the anti-democratic
partisans were always in a minority.
Thus for the brief period succeeding the Civil War, while the wounds
of the conflict were still fresh upon the body politic, the party of
the aristocracy--for such had the Republican party become--utilizing
the soreness still existing as the result of the conflict, succeeded,
by the clamor of sectionalism, in diverting the attention of the masses
from the tendency towards social superiority and “caste,” which the
continuance of the Republican party in power was creating.
This brief ascendency during the first twelve years of the republic
was due to several temporary causes. Most of the great leaders of the
war for independence believed in a strong, centralized government,
and therefore ranked themselves with the Federalists. The failure of
the first attempt at federal control--the Continental Congress--and
the local disorders that arose after the war, had inspired the people
with a dread of anarchy. They were willing to accept, for a time,
restrictive political theories, which it soon became safe to throw off.
The Federalist leaders were more than suspected of aristocratic
tendencies. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, declared in the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, that “the ills of the country come
from an excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue,” he added,
as if in apology, “but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
Sherman, of Connecticut, said at the same time and place that “the
people should have as little to do directly with the government as
possible.”
John Adams repeatedly advocated, in his writings “a liberal use of
titles and ceremonials for those in office,” and the establishment
of an upper legislative chamber to be filled by “the rich, the
well-born, and the able.” The words, “well-born,” gave intense offence.
Their inconsistency with the grand democracy of the Declaration of
Independence was bitterly commented on. The whole Federalist party was
sarcastically called “the well-born”--a fatal appellation!
The expression “well-bred,” as describing the commander of the
Pennsylvania militia at Homestead, will be recalled by the mass of the
people long after every vestige of the militia’s visit to Homestead
has departed. To the American mind such expressions as “well-born” and
“well-bred” present an absurd attempt at class distinction.
Hamilton shared the same theories. He was openly accused by Jefferson,
while both men were members of Washington’s cabinet, of a desire to
overthrow the republic. He was closely connected with the rising
financial power of New York. The people, while they admired his able
and amiable personality, never quite forgave him for the part he took
in defending one Holt, a rich Tory of New York, in a suit for redress
brought by a poor widow whose house he had seized during the British
occupation.
George Washington himself, who was a Federalist so far as he belonged
to any party, was a man of ceremony and _hauteur_. He never forgot that
he had descended from a titled English family, and belonged to the
wealthiest class of Southern landed proprietors. When he assumed the
Presidency, he established an almost courtly etiquette. On Tuesdays
and Fridays he gave stately receptions to visitors; on Thursdays,
Congressional dinners. While New York was the Capital of the Union,
he had a Presidential box at the theatre (the only theatre the city
then boasted), elaborately decorated, and whenever he occupied it,
the orchestra played the “Presidential March” (now known as “Hail
Columbia”).
At his inauguration, the House of Representatives addressed him simply
as “President.” The Senate, probably cognizant of his personal wishes,
sought a more high-sounding title. “His Excellency” was rejected as too
plain, and after some debate the Senators decided upon “His Highness,
the President of the United States, and Protector of their Liberties.”
The Senate’s suggestion was referred to the House, where it aroused no
little opposition. Congressman Tucker, of South Carolina, inquired:
“Will it not alarm our fellow-citizens? Will they not say that they
have been deceived by the Convention that framed the Constitution? One
of its warmest advocates--nay, one of its framers--has recommended it
by calling it a pure democracy. Does giving titles look like a pure
democracy? Surely not. Some one has said that to give dignity to our
government we must give a lofty title to our chief magistrate. If so,
then to make our dignity complete, we must give first a high title,
then an embroidered robe, then a princely equipage, and finally a crown
and hereditary succession. This spirit of imitation, sir, this spirit
of mimicry and apery, will be the ruin of our country. Instead of
giving us dignity in the eyes of foreigners, it will expose us to be
laughed at as apes.”
So decided was the feeling of the House against the adoption of a
sonorous title for the chief executive, that the Senate’s proposal was
dropped. Nevertheless, a more elaborate ceremonial was maintained at
the Presidential mansion--at first in New York, then in Philadelphia,
and finally at Washington--during the first twelve years of the
government, than after Jefferson’s accession in 1801.
Washington’s two elections to the Presidency was the nation’s tribute
to the splendid personal character and military record of the man
who, above all others, gave it nationality. When he refused a third
election, the honor went to John Adams, as his political heir, although
the Federalists, whose candidate Adams was, had only a bare majority
of the electoral college--seventy-one votes against sixty-eight for
Jefferson. It was at that time the almost invariable rule for the
electors to be chosen by the State Legislatures, not, as now, by
a popular vote. Had the conflict between Adams and Jefferson been
waged before the people at large, it is probable that the latter, the
champion of advanced democracy, would have been successful.
John Adams was a man of decided aristocratic tendencies. He was the
first American minister to England, and had spent ten years at the
courts of Europe. He did not conceal his admiration for English
institutions. While in London he wrote a “Defence of the American
Constitution,” which proved to be a laudation of the British form of
government rather than that of the United States. In his “Discourses
on Davilla,” he advocated a powerful centralized executive and a
system of titles. He was frequently charged with favoring a monarchy
and a hereditary legislature like the House of Lords. His political
opponents nicknamed him “the Duke of Braintree”--Braintree being the
Massachusetts town where he lived.
Thus early in the existence of the nation was evident the detestation
on the part of the people at any attempted introduction of “caste” in
the country. The Stamp Act, and taxes, and unjust discrimination while
truly expressed caused the revolution in 1776, were only supplemental
causes. In the record of every colony will be found traces of the
opposition to “caste,” and the strong objection that existed among the
people to the introduction of class distinctions among them. While
the immediate cause of the rebellion on the part of the colonies,
the revolution, and consequent creation of a nation, may appear to
be the resistance to the imposition of taxes and therefore a matter
of pocketbook; still, beneath it all, the foundation upon which
the strength and duration of the resistance to the British power
rested, was the strong sentiment in the hearts of the early patriots,
demanding _equality_, social as well as “equality before the law.” Our
forefathers endured suffering at Valley Forge, not for the sake of the
pocketbook, but because they had in their bosoms that ever-present
sentiment of the Anglo-Saxon people, that all must be equal in every
respect. It is rather a petty cause to assign for the revolution and
the exhibition of heroism upon the part of the forefathers of the
Americans--a matter of taxes.