[172] “You know,” wrote Franklin to his wife on the eve of his
departure, “that I have many enemies ... and very bitter ones; and
you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you.” He
was forced to slip away and get secretly on board the vessel. His
activities were reproved thus by a certain Tory lady:
Oh! had he been wise to pursue
The track for his talents designed,
What a tribute of praise had been due
To the teacher and friend of mankind.
But to covet political fame
Was in him a degrading ambition,
The spark that from Lucifer came,
And kindled the blaze of sedition.
(In _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 267.)
In Sargent’s _Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan
Odell_, these verses are attributed to a less likely source.
[173] _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 398.
[174] _Ibid._, Vol. V, p. 81.
[175] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 428. A good deal of light is thrown upon the
ways of the ministry in Franklin’s account, _Negotiations in London_.
See in particular pp. 37, 68, 76 of Vol. V, where Lord Hyde and Lord
Howe exhibit special solicitude for his advancement. His letters tell
of successive attempts to approach him, and among his works is a
little skit in which he speaks of himself thus: “Your correspondent
_Brittannicus_ inveighs violently against Dr. Franklin, for his
ingratitude to the ministry of this nation, who have conferred upon
him so many favors. They gave him the post-office of America: they
made his son a governor; and they offered him a post of five hundred a
year in the salt-office, if he would relinquish the interests of his
country; but he has had the wickedness to continue true to it, and is
as much an American as ever. As it is a settled point in government
here, that every man has his price, it is plain they are bunglers in
their business, and have not given him enough.” (_Works_, Vol. IV, pp.
534-535.)
[176] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 146.
[177] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, pp. 215, 505.
[178] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 177.
[179] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 254.
[180] P. 64.
[181] See _Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty_, Cambridge Press, Vol. I,
pp. 43-51.
[182] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 19.
[183] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 376.
[184] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 438.
[185] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 401.
[186] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 323.
[187] See “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, etc.,” in _Ibid._,
Vol. II, p. 436.
[188] “On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry,” in _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp.
448-451.
[189] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 282. For Franklin’s views on American
representation in Parliament, see Vol. VII, pp. 315, 329.
[190] See the pamphlet indorsed _Some Good Whig Principles_, of the
probable date of 1768-69, in _Works_, Vol. II.
[191] _Works of Thomas Paine_, edited by Moncure D. Conway, Vol. IV, p.
465.
[192] In “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the
Constitution of Pennsylvania,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 167.
Part Two: The Awakening of the American Mind • 1763-1783
Chapter I • Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule
I • Background Facts
The American Revolution remains after a hundred and fifty years
somewhat of a puzzle to historians. Much careful investigation has
been done in the last two decades, but we still know too little to
speak confidently or with a sense of finality. The appeal to arms would
seem to have been brought about by a minority of the American people,
directed by a small group of skillful leaders, who like Indian scouts,
covered their tracks so cleverly that only the keenest trailers can
now follow their course and understand their strategy. On the other
hand, the philosophy of revolution is familiar to us. Revolutions
are born of an abnormal state of mind, sensitized by an accumulated
body of experience. They are psychological explosions, resulting from
irritations commonly economic in origin, and they are conditioned in
their programs by the stock of knowledge and aspiration peculiar to
their time and place. Two determining facts, then, would seem to lie
at the root of the American Revolution: the American psychology which
shaped the colonial outlook, and the peculiar situation of the British
Empire at the close of the French and Indian war.[193]
In old age John Adams “hazarded an opinion, that the true history of
the American revolution could not be recovered,” for “the revolution
was effected before the war commenced. The revolution was in the
minds and hearts of the people.”[194] Accepting Adams’s thesis of a
change in American psychology, we may hazard a further opinion that
the revolution resulted from the emergence in the two countries of
divergent interpretations of the theory and practice of sovereignty,
which may be sufficiently distinguished by the terms local home rule
and imperial centralization. In the beginning it was a clash of
jurisdiction between colonial self-government and absentee paternalism;
but later it developed into an open challenge of the monarchical
principle. A popular will to self-rule had long been developing in
America, and when the outbreak of hostilities clarified its latent
objective, it speedily asserted a conscious republican purpose. To
many of the early supporters of the colonial protest, this republican
outcome was unforeseen and deeply regretted; but it was implicit in
the whole history of colonial development, and must ultimately stand
sharply revealed, once its aspirations were balked.
If the crisis was precipitated almost casually by the program of
parliamentary regulation, the long drift towards alienation was far
from casual. An American mind had been created by the silent pressure
of environment. A large measure of economic freedom had developed
an American liberalism, frankly and vigorously individualistic. It
was not consciously democratic, or even republican. There were few
avowed democrats in the stolid mass of colonial provincialism; a busy
and commonplace routine offered little opportunity for revolutionary
appeal to a people grown lethargic from economic abundance. Of social
unrest, the common fuel of revolutionary fires, there was practically
none; and but for a blundering ministerial imperialism that challenged
this nascent liberalism, throwing over it the mantle of patriotism,
the colonies would have written a very different history. Once the
crisis was precipitated, however, and it became clear that imperial
centralization was encroaching upon local rights, the liberal impulses
in the background of the American mind assumed a militant form and
purpose.
The existence of this native liberalism had been stupidly overlooked
and ignored by responsible statesmen. With the exception of Franklin,
colonial spokesmen were commonly members of the aristocratic group,
among whom the Tory philosophy was spreading fast. Gentlemen in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston fashioned their manners upon
the polite world of St. James’s and caught the Tory ways in politics
as naturally as the London style in wigs. They associated with the
royal officials, traveled in England, corresponded with members of
Parliament. advised in all matters of colonial policy, and proved
themselves the most shortsighted of counselors. Upon their heads rest
in part the blunders of the ministry. In failing to understand the
native liberalism of America, they not only shared responsibility for
an unwise policy, but they hastened their own destruction. Samuel Adams
could not have played so effectively upon the popular prejudices if
the Hutchinsons and Olivers had not brought the Tory ways into wide
disrepute by their arrogance.
Colonial liberalism, on the other hand, was not so simple and
homogeneous as we long believed. It was rather a somewhat vague
composite of the aspirations of three diverse geographical areas, with
different economic interests, social ways, and political ideals. The
middle and northern coast region, with its mercantile cities, was a
distinct area; the tidewater region from Maryland to Georgia, with its
plantation economy, constituted another; and the indefinite backcountry
beyond the older settlements, stretching from Maine southward along
the Alleghany watershed, constituted a third. The first was dominated
by a merchant group--wholesale importers and exporters--wealthy and
conservative, but with a great majority of the population--small
tradesmen, mechanics and yeomen--far more democratic than the
leaders. The second was controlled by the aristocratic planters,
whose leadership during the crises of the dispute with England was
rejected by an economically strong but socially inferior body of
factors or alien middlemen. The third was composed of thousands of
small freeholders, largely Scotch-Irish and German, who acknowledged
no leadership, were unconsciously democratic in their ways, suspicious
of the seacoast aristocracy, wedded to an agrarian philosophy. The
merchant group was liberal only to the extent that liberalism meant
profit: their commercial relations with England constituted them
the closest tie between the two countries, and their timid love
of established ways made them naturally conservative rather than
revolutionary. The planter group possessed the traditional independence
of English gentlemen: they would tolerate no outside dictation in
matters concerning their own parishes, and their burdensome debts to
English merchants cooled the ardor of their loyalty to Great Britain.
The frontier agrarians, on the other hand, were pronounced liberals by
environment and training to whom English ties were at the strongest
only sentimental. They were republican in temper, and becoming class
conscious during the ten years of debate, they grew rapidly in power
and finally turned America against England. A recent historian has thus
characterized the change of temper which brought these agrarians to the
front as the fighting strength of the republicans:
A new class, formed within a decade, growing rapidly in numbers,
was rising to power. In Pennsylvania, as in a number of other
colonies, it consisted of small farmers in the back country,
Scotch-Irish and German immigrants, reënforced by the voteless
laborers and artisans of Philadelphia or other seaboard cities....
For over a decade this rising democracy had struggled for power
against the little seaboard aristocracy of wealth and accepted
social leadership.... The colonial masses could no longer be
controlled by reverence for the high-born. The Quaker merchants of
Philadelphia, the holders of manors on the Hudson, the tobacco and
rice planters of Virginia and South Carolina, and even the great
merchants, clergy, and professional men of New England, could no
longer rule without question their social inferiors.... Thus, in
1774, came the climax in the struggle between rich and poor, East
and West, those with a vote and those who were voteless, between
privilege and the welfare of the common man. The two classes might
work in harmony or might clash on the question of resistance to
Great Britain, but they were pretty sure to be in opposition on
the issue of individual rights. A merchant ... might welcome the
support of the mechanics and small shopkeepers against a grievous
tax by the British Government, but the price, a right to vote and
to hold office, he was sure to resent, and he grew more and more
alarmed as the pressure became more insistent.[195]
From the imperial point of view there were the soundest reasons why,
following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Parliament should have desired
to set about reorganizing the far-spread British Empire. Within a
few years vast territories had been added to the crown, and if the
scattered parts were to be gathered into a cohesive and powerful whole
there was need of a definite policy of coördination and integration.
The American colonies were only a small part of the total empire, and
it was generally agreed among English statesmen that the old policy of
“salutary neglect” could no longer serve imperial interests. If the
Whig imperialists under the leadership of Pitt had been put in charge
of imperial reconstruction, the outcome very likely would have been
peaceful. But unfortunately for the empire the colonial problem became
embroiled with English domestic politics. The purpose of the King was
to set up a personal autocracy with Tory help, overthrow the rule of
the Whig families, eliminate from the ministry the more intelligent
Old Whig leaders--Pitt, Camden, Barré, Burke, Shelburne--and bring in
a narrow-minded group who held to the obsolete mercantilist theory
of colonial dependency. The immediate outcome was the inauguration
of a policy that ran counter to the economic interests of the three
major colonial regions and aroused the hostility of important colonial
groups. Every successive enactment was a greater blunder, until the
crowning stupidity of the tea monopoly--which used colonial interests
as a pawn in a game of the East India Company--threw the colonial fat
into the fire.
The grievances of the merchants resulting from the regulatory trade
acts were real and serious. However the ministry might justify those
acts before Parliament, their effects were disastrous to substantial
colonial interests, and to American eyes seemed designed to bring
colonial trade into further subjection to English merchants. The
attempt to suppress the widespread practice of smuggling was ill
advised even though logical, for it aroused the consuming public as
well as the middlemen, and gave popular backing to the protests of the
merchants. The total political result was to align against Parliament
the most influential groups in the trading towns--the wealthy importers
and the professional classes--and provided opportunity to the radicals
to spread their propaganda under cover of respectable leadership.
The movement of resistance thus set on foot by the class-conscious
merchants eventually slipped from their control and passed into the
hands of the Sons of Liberty, who drove faster and farther than
conservative business men would willingly follow; yet these latter
soon found themselves coerced by tumultuous forces which they had
unwittingly loosed. In consequence there came a time of divided
counsels, and when independence was finally declared large numbers of
the wealthiest and most dignified merchants turned Loyalist and threw
in their lot with the King. More than two hundred quitted Boston on its
evacuation by General Gage. Others stood apart as neutrals till the
war was over, and then drew together in a compact organization to stem
the tide of post-war agrarianism and assist in setting up a federal
government after their liking.[196]
The grievances of the plantation group were less obvious but none the
less real. Probably more critical than taxation or the debts owed to
English merchants, was the question of the western lands. The Quebec
Act stirred the South as the tea monopoly stirred Boston and New York
and Philadelphia. Involved in that act were certain long accepted
colonial rights of domain, on the strength of which vast speculation
in backcountry lands had been engaged in by English and colonial land
companies and individuals.[197] The question was extraordinarily
complicated, involving the rights of the Indians, the ambition of
the Hudson Bay Company to retain the western wilderness as a vast
fur preserve, the rights of Catholics in the French settlements,
the rights of the imperial treasury to income from the sale of the
lands, the rights of soldiers of the French wars to lands granted by
colonial legislatures, the rights of frontiersmen to free settlement
and exploitation, as well as specific grants to several colonies, in
particular Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia. From this mass
of conflicting interests, all eager to exploit an incalculably rich
domain, little hope of satisfactory solution offered, and a wiser
ministry would have kept hands off. But an ill-considered Parliamentary
enactment cut the knot in a way to arouse the quick and keen resentment
of America. Whatever may be said for the solution, one thing is clear;
it set aside by arbitrary statute cherished rights which Virginian
gentlemen, with their eyes on rich plantations to the West, deeply
resented. It was a matter of vital concern to colonies like Virginia
that they should control their wilderness frontier. The Quebec Act not
only alienated thousands of western colonials, but it provided them
with influential leaders like Washington and Robert Morris. It was more
fuel to the radical bonfire.
In the end the fortunes of the revolutionary movement rested with the
yeomanry, and this yeomanry with its agrarian outlook and republican
sympathies, was in a mood to respond to radical appeal. That the farmer
was induced to take down his squirrel rifle and fight King George was
made possible by a number of irritations--his deep-rooted prejudice
against aristocracy, his instinctive dislike of crown officials, his
inveterate localism that resented alien interference--as well as by
substantial class interests. In every colony the party of incipient
populism had been checked and thwarted by royal officials; and it was
this mass of populistic discontent, seeing itself in danger of being
totally crushed, and its interests ignored, that provided the rank and
file of armed opposition to the King. Already Parliament had brought
acute financial distress to the colonies by forbidding the emission
of bills of credit; and other attacks on popular policies followed.
The strength of the popular opposition to royal programs had lain
heretofore in the legislative control of the purse; by threatening to
withhold salaries, the democratic legislatures had been able to coerce
the royal governor and the judges, and keep them somewhat responsive
to the popular will. To the Tories such coercion was proof that the
democratic claws needed cutting, and one of the purposes of the Stamp
Act was the providing of a fund to pay the royal officials out of the
royal chest. It was a skillful plan, but it overreached itself. Party
alignment had become too sharp, agrarian suspicions had grown too
sensitive, for the plan to succeed. The immediate, fatal result was the
accession of a numerous body of fighting men to the other malcontents.
The American Revolution was one of the first fruits of a shortsighted
imperialism. A generous policy of imperial federation would have
returned incredible revenues to Great Britain; but the Tory ministry
was not intelligent enough to let sleeping dogs lie. A sentimental
attachment had kept America loyal. So long as his customary and
traditional rights remained undisturbed, the colonial would throw
up his cap for King George; but if he were driven to choose between
loyalty and self-interest, between sentiment and profit, the choice
was certain. If the heavy debts which the foolish wars of Pitt had
bequeathed to the Empire had not seemed to offer a justification,
the Tory blunderers would not have forced the issue; but once it was
joined, vast numbers of Americans came to believe that the development
of their country had reached a point where it would be hampered by
further overseas regulation; that America must be free to exploit her
resources to her exclusive advantage; and that such economic freedom
would be possible only with political independence. It was the ill
luck of the ministry to present the question so concretely that the
colonial radicals were given an opportunity to awaken the latent forces
of American liberalism and turn them against English sovereignty.
A militant nationalistic psychology resulted from a widespread
propaganda, and the last ties with England were broken.
II • Argument and Propaganda
We understand the ways of propaganda today better than our fathers
understood them, and the official pronouncements of diplomats and
statesmen we have grown somewhat skeptical of. Historians of the
American Revolution have paid rather too exclusive attention to formal
speeches and state papers, forgetting that those speeches and papers
too often served the purpose of obscuring and evading the real issues.
The ten years of dreary debate preceding the clash of arms, during
which theory and precedent were examined by partisan lawyers, did
little more than serve party purposes on both sides of the Atlantic,
investing immediate interests with nationalistic or imperialistic
idealism. Honest men talked themselves into a passion, but they took
good care that their cause should appear dressed to advantage.
On the American side the argument fell into two broad divisions: an
attempt to justify the colonial position by appeal to the British
constitution, and when that failed by an appeal to the extra-legal
doctrine of natural right. To understand the obscure constitutional
wrangle, it must be recalled that important changes in English
constitutional practice had taken place since the colonies were
founded. Parliamentary sovereignty had superseded royal sovereignty,
or in other words, the sovereignty of property had superseded divine
right autocracy; and this in turn was undergoing change in the second
half of the eighteenth century--the sovereignty of landed property
was challenged by the rising capitalism. The Revolution of 1688 had
established the general principle that the state can take no property
in the form of taxes or levies without the consent of the owner, given
by himself or by his representative sitting in Parliament. But in
current practice the system of representation had become so misshapen
that a new theory had arisen to give constitutional sanction to
existing methods. Refusal to reapportion representation had resulted in
the notorious rotten-borough system, control of which boroughs was too
valuable an asset to the ruling oligarchy to be surrendered. To justify
the scandal a new theory of virtual representation was developed--a
theory upon which turned much of the early revolutionary debate. In
brief the theory asserted that as Parliament speaks for the total body
of Englishmen, it makes no practical difference who elects them, where
they live, who they are, or what interests they represent. Within the
halls of Parliament they can be trusted to think and legislate for the
nation as a whole. The essential constitutional principle requires
only that there shall be a respectable body chosen from among the
commons of England, in whose hands shall rest the custody of the purse,
and who shall serve as a check upon the royal prerogative. Such was
the parliamentary situation in 1763, and when appeal was made by the
colonials to the principle of no taxation without representation, it
was answered by appeal to the theory of virtual representation.
American constitutional practice, on the other hand, had developed in
a contrary direction. Quite as consciously as Parliament, the several
colonial legislatures rested on the principle of property rights, but
a different system of representation had developed. By easy logic a
geographical theory had emerged, by the terms of which a legislator
must be a freeman of the district rather than of the realm, that he
should hold power for a short period and frequently submit his conduct
to the scrutiny of the electors, and that a district should bear a just
per capita relation to the total population. The doctrine of virtual
representation was alien to colonial theory, although in fact it might
be applied to the large body of disfranchised non-property-holders.
The broad difference, then, in the legislative practice of the two
countries lay in the important distinction between local, numerical
representation, and a grotesque system of borough jobbing. Both systems
rested on a narrow suffrage, although the colonial basis was very
much broader. The difference was without significance so long as the
traditional relations between America and England continued; but when
Parliament proposed to extend the theory of virtual representation
to the colonies, and treat Massachusetts and Virginia as on a
constitutional footing with Birmingham and Manchester, the difference
became acute. No American colony was willing to become the pawn of
parliamentary placemen, at the mercy of parliamentary jobbery.
The debate over this vital question was involved in obscurities by
reason of the vagueness of the British constitution. If an unwritten
constitution be no other than established practice--and it is true of
the English constitution in spite of the body of principles existing in
such pronouncements as Magna Charta, the settlement of 1689, and the
Common Law--then the current practice of Parliament must be accepted as
constitutional. This was the fatal weakness of the colonial argument,
as it was the weakness of Pitt and other defenders of America in
Parliament. When Pitt exclaimed with characteristic grandiloquence,
“I come not here armed at all points with law cases and acts of
Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog-ears, to defend
the cause of liberty,” he abandoned the legal ground to appeal to the
sense of justice and right of Englishmen. But the question could not
so easily be transferred from the domain of constitutional law. For
upwards of a hundred years Parliament had been sovereign, and for the
colonials now to deny its sovereignty meant one of two things: either
to go back to the obsolete principle of divine right, or to postulate
an extra-parliamentary body of constitutional law, unknown to English
practice. A sovereignty inhering neither in King nor Parliament,
but in a super-constitution, was a conception that had been played
with by Coke in an endeavor to exalt the Common Law, and hinted at
by later Whig statesmen, but which had never established itself in
practice. The colonials recognized the dilemma and made half-hearted
attempts to evade it. John Adams and Franklin endeavored to argue
that as the colonial charters were from the crown, and antedated the
rise of Parliament, Americans owed allegiance to the King and not to
Parliament, and hence parliamentary pretentions to sovereignty over
America were only a new form of unconstitutional prerogative. But
the argument was taken seriously by neither side, and was soon put
away.[198]
It finally became clear to American leaders that if their cause were
to make headway, appeal must be made to broader principles. Their
case must rest on philosophical rather than on legal grounds. This
suffices to explain the shift from constitutionalism to abstract
rights, which marked the middle period of the debate. By 1773 it had
become evident to thoughtful observers that the cause of American
liberalism must fail, or become revolutionary in purpose and intent,
and to become such it must seek justification in extra-constitutional
principles. And this justification it discovered in the writings of
English liberals of the seventeenth century--in Sidney and Milton, and
above all in Locke. The influence of Locke had long been paramount in
English political speculation. He had been the apologist and defender
of the settlement of 1689; the principles which he expounded lay at the
base of the dynastic rights of the reigning house, and were nominally
accepted by all the parliamentary leaders. The relations between
natural rights and parliamentary sovereignty had not wholly clarified,
and in the background of English constitutional thought still lingered
a vague notion of certain natural rights above the constitution, and
limiting parliamentary statutes. Thinkers as different as Blackstone
and Camden subscribed to such doctrine, but it daily became more
tenuous in the face of a growing acceptance of unlimited parliamentary
sovereignty.[199]
In turning to Locke, therefore, the colonial debaters went back a
century and picked up the argument of liberalism as it existed before
it had been nullified by later English practice. They occupied a
position similar to that defended by him a hundred years before;
they were combating the same arbitrary rule that had brought on the
Revolution of 1688. He had laid down the basic principle of revolution
in the doctrine of certain natural rights of the subject which no state
may subvert without peril to the original compact; he had asserted
that taxation without representation constituted such subversive
tyranny; and he gave high sanction to the right and duty of resistance
to an encroaching sovereignty. The noble words, “Chains are but an
ill wearing how much soever we gild or polish them,” uttered a note
of defiance to arbitrary power which struck a responsive chord in the
breast of the colonial liberal. In short, Locke’s two _Treatises on
Civil Government_, aimed at Sir Robert Filmer’s absurd _Patriarcha_,
were turned against Parliament and became the textbook of the American
Revolution.
The ground had been well prepared. The argument of Locke went home
with such convincing force to the colonial liberal because it embodied
conclusions towards which America had long been moving. It was an
eloquent confirmation of native experience, a sober justification
of the psychology of individualism. The self-governing state had so
long been an established fact in colonial life as to have assumed the
complexion of a natural right. The political compact had taken form in
American political thought, a generation before Locke gave currency to
the theory, and Jefferson was expressing native conclusions drawn from
American experience when he argued that “governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” It is not true to assert that Jefferson was only reciting
Locke, with modifications derived from the French humanitarians. It is
nearer the truth to say that he made use of old-world philosophy to
express and justify certain native tendencies then seeking adequate
statement.
To such an experience, armed with such a philosophy, there must
come eventually the conviction that both monarchy and aristocracy
were irrational; that the ambitions of a coercive alien sovereignty
were fraught with danger to the rights of the American citizen.
The resurgent absolutism of Stuart times, with its doctrine of
the omnicompetent state, which the King was reviving through the
instrumentality of Parliament, was broken by the stubborn colonial
resistance. Absolutism under whatever form was doomed in America,
however slowly it might linger out its life. Jonathan Boucher might
seek to revive Sir Robert Filmer, and preach to Americans the dogma of
divine right through royal primogeniture from Adam, and other colonial
Tories might applaud; but they were fast becoming anachronisms.
The Revolution was to overthrow for Americans the principle of the
absolutist state, and substitute a modified sovereignty, circumscribed
by the utilitarian test of its relation to the common well-being of its
citizens. For the first time in modern history it was discovered that
“the true meaning of sovereignty,” as a recent student has put it, is
to be sought “not in the coercive power possessed by its instrument
[the state,] but in the fused good-will for which it stands.”[200]
III • Certain Social Consequences
The swift crystallization of colonial sentiment in favor of
republicanism, as the crisis developed, produced the American
revolution of which John Adams wrote. The long leveling process of
a hundred and forty years, with its psychology of decentralization,
fruited naturally in a new political philosophy fitted to new-world
conditions. Monarchy, with its social appanage of aristocracy, was
a caste institution wholly unsuited to an unregimented America. The
war brought this revolutionary fact home to the consciousness of
thousands of colonials; and the liberalism that before had been vaguely
instinctive quickly became eager and militant. The old order was
passing; the day of the Tory in America was over for the present; the
republican was henceforth to be master of the new world. Out of this
primary revolution were to come other revolutions, social and economic,
made possible by the new republican freedom.
The swift rise of a political philosophy traditionally regarded as
mean and traitorous was inexplicable to Tory gentlemen, and aroused a
fierce retaliatory opposition. A social war of the classes, bitter,
vindictive, followed upon hostilities against England. The arrogance of
the gentry during those brisk days when the new spirit was rising is
scarcely comprehensible to later Americans unused to such frankness.
The republicans were scorned by the superior classes as unprincipled
sedition-mongers, plotting treason against the King and society. If
commoners flocked to town-meetings and outvoted the gentlemen, the
latter were outraged at the presumption of the “mobsters” in flouting
their betters. For the plain people to take things into their own hands
was no other than anarchy. The familiar records of the day are filled
with such aristocratic jests as this:
Down at night a bricklayer or carpenter lies,
Next sun a Lycurgus, a Solon doth rise.[201]
“The dirty mob was all about me as I drove into town,” said Mistress
Peggy Hutchinson, as she looked out on turbulent Boston from her
father’s chariot; and her feminine contempt for the common people was
an echo of the universal Tory contempt for republican mechanics and
farmers. It was the duty of the vulgar, as loyal subjects, to pay taxes
and not lay them; to obey the law and not make it. By far the most
important consequence of the Revolution was the striking down of this
mounting aristocratic spirit that was making rapid headway with the
increase of wealth. It sifted the American people as the migrations
of the seventeenth century had sifted the English people, keeping
the republicans at home and sending forth the Tories, weakening the
influence of the conservatives and increasing the influence of the
liberals. Few experiences in our history have proved so momentous in
results as this shift of power and change in personnel that resulted
from the great schism. A middle-class America was to rise on the ruins
of the colonial aristocracy.
The unfortunate Loyalists were victims of their own blindness. They did
not rightly estimate the driving power of the liberal forces released
by the struggle, and failing to understand, they staked everything on
the issue, and lost, and were driven rudely out of the land by the
plebeian republicans whom they despised. The disruption of colonial
society resulting from the expulsion of the Loyalists was far graver
than we commonly assume. Shiploads of excellent gentlemen, and among
them the most cultivated minds in America, were driven from their
firesides and sent forth to seek new homes, whether in “Hell, Hull
or Halifax” mattered little to the victors. Upward of forty thousand
sought refuge in Canada; thousands more went to the Bahamas; and still
other thousands returned to the old home. “There will scarcely be a
village in England without some American dust in it, I believe, by
the time we are all at rest,” wrote the Loyalist Dutchman, Peter Van
Schaak. Much suffering was endured and much bitterness engendered, and
if for years the dominant temper in Canada was fiercely hostile to
the United States, the mood is traceable to the expatriated gentlemen
who transmitted to their children a grudge against the victorious
republicans. It was an unhappy business, but it was scarcely avoidable
once appeal was made to the sword. There was no longer place in America
for the foolish dream of a colonial aristocracy.
The change of temper that came over American society with the loss of
the Loyalists, was immense and far-reaching. For the first time the
middle class was free to create a civilization after its own ideals.
In rising to leadership it brought another spirit into every phase
of life. Dignity and culture henceforth were to count for less and
assertiveness for more. Ways became less leisurely, the social temper
less urbane. The charm of the older aristocracy disappeared along
with its indisputable evils. Although a few of the older wits like
Mather Byles lingered on bitterly, and others like Gouverneur Morris
accepted the situation philosophically, they belonged to the past. A
franker evaluation of success in terms of money began to obscure the
older personal and family distinction. New men brought new ways and a
vulgar clamor of politics went hand in hand with business expansion.
The demagogue and the speculator discovered a fruitful field for
their activities. The new capitalism lay on the horizon of republican
America, and the middle class was eager to hasten its development.
But a new economic order required a new political state, and as a
necessary preliminary, the spirit of nationalism began that slow
encroachment upon local frontiers which was to modify profoundly the
common psychology. Americanism superseded colonialism, and with the new
loyalty there developed a conception of federal sovereignty, overriding
all local authorities, checking the movement of particularism, binding
the separate commonwealths in a consolidating union. This marked
the turning point in American development; the checking of the long
movement of decentralization and the beginning of a counter movement of
centralization--the most revolutionary change in three hundred years of
American experience. The history of the rise of the coercive state in
America, with the ultimate arrest of all centrifugal tendencies, was
implicit in that momentous counter movement.
Footnotes
[193] An excellent short statement of the causes of the American
Revolution is given by A. M. Schlesinger in _New Viewpoints in American
History_, Chapter VII. Compare C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the War
of Independence_.
[194] Letter to Mr. Niles, January 14, 1818.
[195] Van Tyne, _Causes of the War of Independence_, pp. 424-426.
[196] For an admirable study, see A. M. Schlesinger, _The Colonial
Merchants and the American Revolution: 1763-1776_.
[197] This important subject has been examined by C. W. Alvord, _The
Mississippi Valley in British Policies_: C. A. Beard, _An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution_; C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the
War of Independence_.
[198] For an excellent discussion of the constitutional questions
involved, see C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the War of Independence_,
Chapters VIII and IX.
[199] For this see Van Tyne, _ibid._, pp. 234-238.
[200] H. J. Laski, _The Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 12; see also
Appendices A and B.
[201] Moore, _Diary of the Revolution_, Vol. II, p. 22.
Chapter II • The Mind of the American Tory
So nearly forgotten by later generations is the American Tory of
Revolutionary times that it will be well to examine the genus with some
care; for only by understanding the great authority inhering in his
traditional leadership can we measure his power to thwart the ambitions
of the republicans. In numbers the Tories were a very small minority;
unendowed with wealth and position they would have been negligible; but
as members of the local gentry they enjoyed great prestige which was
highly serviceable to the royal cause. Although native born they aped
the English aristocracy, and reproduced on a less magnificent scale
the manners of the English landed families. Less arrogant than their
old-world models, certainly much less corrupt in their politics, they
exuded the same aristocratic prejudices and the same narrow sympathies.
Their most cherished dream was the institution of an American nobility,
with the seal of royal favor set upon their social pretensions. They
were the embodiment of the aristocratic eighteenth century, in a world
instinctively hostile to all aristocracies. Out of a numerous company
of distinguished Tories, three will serve for consideration--Thomas
Hutchinson, Royal Governor, Daniel Leonard, lawyer, and Jonathan
Boucher, minister.
I • Thomas Hutchinson • Royal Governor
The career of the last royal governor of Massachusetts affords a
suggestive study in the relation of material prosperity to political
principles. Descended in the fourth generation from the Antinomian
enthusiast, Mistress Anne Hutchinson, whom all the authorities of
Boston could neither terrify nor silence, but who suffered contumely
and exile rather than submit her will to official censors, Thomas
Hutchinson reveals in his stiff conservatism the common change that
follows upon economic well-being. The House of Hutchinson had long
since abandoned all unprofitable radicalisms and had taken to the safer
business of acquiring property and respectability; in which work it
had by God’s blessing greatly prospered, until it came to be reckoned
the first house in the province. With growing wealth political honors
multiplied. The grandfather of the governor had been the first Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas, Commander of the Forces, Assistant,
and Councilor; and at his death in 1717 he was as eminent a citizen
as Chief Justice Sewall, the diarist. The governor’s father, Thomas
Hutchinson, Sr., devoted more attention to his calling of merchant than
to politics, nevertheless he sat in the Council for twenty-five years,
and was a colonel in the provincial militia. With the advent of Thomas
Hutchinson upon the scene, the respectability of the house was assured,
abundant wealth had been accumulated, and the path of political
preferment was open. The little colony was eager to confer honors on
so promising a son. He was ambitious and thrifty, and he coveted the
distinction and the material rewards which officeholding brought. No
Boston gentleman of his day had a sharper eye for the main chance. He
added office to office, and at one and the same time he was Member of
the Council, Judge of Probate, Chief Justice, and Lieutenant Governor;
and such other offices as he could not himself possess he maneuvered to
get into the hands of his sons, and brothers-in-law, and dependents.
One of those brothers-in-law, Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather,
who refused to follow his kinsman into the Tory camp, called him “an
avaritious man”; and avaricious of power, even more than of money, he
certainly was.
With his abundant offices and honors, there was every temptation
to conservatism. Unless there was hidden in him some lingering
idealism, some seed of the ancestral radicalism to sprout and grow
into discontent, Thomas Hutchinson was marked for a reactionary.
And unhappily in his conventional soul there was not the faintest
spark of idealism. The enthusiasm of Mistress Anne was washed clean
out of the Hutchinson blood, leaving only the native stubbornness;
which stubbornness, dominating a character cold, formal, arrogant,
dogmatic, unimaginative, self-righteous, was finally to play havoc
with Thomas Hutchinson’s good fortune. The son of a merchant, he was
a careful, methodical soul, who studied how to save and invest; in a
later generation he would have been a great banker, but in his own he
preferred to invest in politics. How suggestive of Yankee thrift is
such an entry as this:
All the time he was at College he carried on a little trade by
sending ventures in his father’s vessels, & kept a little paper
Journal & leger, & enterd in it every dinner, supper, breakfast,
& every article of expense, even of a shilling; which practice
soon became pleasant; & he found it of great use all his life....
Before he came of age, he had, by adventuring to sea from two or
three quintalls [hundredweight] of fish, given him by his father,
when about 12 years old, acquired four or five hundred pounds
sterling.[202]
After a number of years in his father’s countinghouse, learning
the ways of eighteenth-century trade, he abandoned the mercantile
career and entered politics at the age of six-and-twenty. From May
31, 1737, when he first took his place in the House of Deputies
as one of the “Boston Seat,” to June 1, 1774, when he quitted his
country home at Milton to take ship for London and exile, he was a
power in the political life of Massachusetts, reaching eventually
the highest station. During that long period of thirty-seven years
he was a spokesman of the New England gentry, always on the side of
government, never in the opposition. That he ever critically examined
the foundations of his political creed, there is nothing in the printed
record to indicate. He had some of the tastes of the book-lover and
scholar. He was deeply interested in the Puritan past, and his _History
of Massachusetts Bay_ was based on a wide knowledge of manuscript
sources which he had been at great pains to collect. But in spite of a
praiseworthy care for accuracy and impartiality, he lacked the creative
imagination to reconstruct the past. He had pretty much freed his
mind from religious bigotry, but he could not rid himself of a narrow
partisanship, and his treatment of the agrarian movement was grossly
unfair. His shortcomings as a political thinker were more striking. His
knowledge of the political classics was of the slightest. When Samuel
Adams made use of the natural-rights theory, Hutchinson’s comment
would indicate that he had no acquaintance with the theory and had not
even read Locke.[203] He was little given to intellectual interests,
and ill at ease in dealing with general principles. He possessed the
mental qualities of a lawyer rather than a speculative thinker, and his
long immersion in office contracted a mind naturally sterile to the
routine habits of an administrator. He hardened early, and thereafter
he was incapable of changing his views or liberalizing his sympathies.
Consistency he erected into a fetish and once he had taken a position
he would not budge from it. He did not understand the liberal America
that was rising about him--neither the economic forces that were
creating it nor the spokesmen who represented it; and he saw no reason
for change. The House of Hutchinson had prospered under existing
conditions, and other houses would prosper likewise, he believed,
if they were equally honest and diligent. So he went his tactless,
unintelligent way, barking his shins on every liberal tendency of the
times, and hating the men who gave him trouble.
Hutchinson, in short, was a complete Tory, and if we would understand
him and his class, we must first take into account the current Tory
philosophy. Compressed into a sentence it was the expression of the
will-to-power of the wealthy. Its motive was economic class interest,
and its object the exploitation of society through the instrumentality
of the state. Stated thus, the philosophy does not appear to advantage;
it lays itself open to unpleasant criticism by those who are not
its beneficiaries. In consequence, much ingenuity in tailoring
was necessary to provide it with garments to cover its nakedness.
Embroidered with patriotism, loyalty, law and order, it made a very
respectable appearance; and when it put on the stately robe of the
British Constitution, it was enormously impressive. The Tory theory
of the British Constitution may well be regarded as a masterpiece of
the gentle art of tailoring. Government by king, lords, and commons it
asserted, approximated the ideal of a “mixt government,” embracing the
total wisdom of the realm, ruling in the interests of all, avoiding
the evils of class domination, and chastising the refractory only for
the common good. Gentlemen might well praise the “glorious British
Constitution.” It was their little jest at the expense of the English
people, who were content to be exploited by them.
In this game of political pretense Hutchinson willingly shared. He
knew that Parliament did not represent the English people; that it was
controlled by a group of landed gentlemen with mercenaries in their
pay; and yet in reply to repeated charges he revealed no hint of the
truth, but reiterated the familiar Tory interpretation in the face of
shrewd enemies who knew that he was insincere. In private among other
gentlemen, Hutchinson was frank enough. He knew what was at stake
in America--whether political control should remain in the hands of
“gentlemen of principle and property,” with the assistance of English
Tories, or whether it should pass into the hands of the majority. And
so while declaiming against mobs, and preaching loyalty to the best of
kings, he secretly busied himself with influential persons in devising
methods to frustrate the Whig ambitions. Moreover in dealing with his
enemies he was a thorough realist. In his comment on American Whigs and
their political methods, he set down many a shrewd and just estimate
of their actions and motives. But in defense of the English ministry
he refused to face reality. He quibbled and misrepresented and denied,
stooping to dirty politics to hold his party together and strengthen it.
At the moment when Hutchinson assumed the duties of governor the
situation was tense. Bernard had muddled things sadly, and “the
rage against him became, at length, so violent, that it was judged
necessary to recall him,”[204] and he slipped off to England to receive
a baronetcy and a pension. But he had brought the commonwealth to
the parting of the ways, and Hutchinson found himself in a difficult
position. The roots of the trouble are laid bare in the following
affidavit of Bernard:
In the Province of Massachusetts Bay, when civil authority
was reduced so low as to have nothing left but the form of a
government, and scarce even that, an enquiry into the causes of so
great a weakness in the governing power was unavoidable; and there
was no entering upon such an enquiry, without observing upon the
ill effects of that part of the constitution of that government,
whereby the appointment of the Council is left to the people, to be
made by annual election; and yet the Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative, is subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council. This solecism in policy has been as hurtful in practice
as it is absurd in theory, and it is the true cause of the extreme
imbecility of the power of the crown in this government, at times
when the exertion of it is most wanted. This is not an observation
of a new date; it is of many years standing; ... ever since he has
felt the effects which the popular constitution of the Council
has had upon the Royalty of the government, which is above three
years ago; within which time, he has seen the King deprived of
the service of every man at the Council Board, who has resolution
enough to disapprove the opposition to the authority of the King
and the Parliament, and their supremacy over the _American_
Colonies. This, and this only, is the foundation of the charge
of their endeavouring to overthrow the charter; whereas his real
desire has been, that the charter should have a more durable
stability, by means of a necessary alteration, without which, he
is persuaded it cannot have a much longer duration; as the abuse
of the appointment of the Council now prevailing, must oblige the
Parliament to interfere sooner or later.[205]
The more thoughtfully one considers this frank statement the more
clearly it appears what grounds for party dissension lay in the
“solecism” of a constitution whereby the “Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative,” was “subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council.” It would not be easy to patch up a working compromise between
an absentee prerogative and the local democratic will; one or the
other must be sovereign; and because the terms of the charter enabled
the democracy to nullify the prerogative, Bernard concluded that the
charter must be revised and the abuse corrected. In this Hutchinson
agreed, and from the imperial point of view not without reason. “By
an unfortunate mistake,” he wrote in apology to Gage, “soon after
the charter, a law passed which made every town in the Province a
corporation perfectly democratic.” With every passing year the mistake
was becoming more unfortunate, and the vital problem before government,
in the opinion of Hutchinson, was how to correct this unfortunate
mistake, together with other like mistakes, with such happy skill as
to check the democratic branch without arousing popular resentment. On
this reef Hutchinson foundered.
As early as 1764 the meddlesome Bernard had proposed to the home
government a complete remodeling of colonial governments on the English
Tory plan; and by way of suggestion he forwarded some proposals looking
to the eventual consolidation of the several colonies under a single
royal government, the erection of a house of lords as a balance to the
popular party and a comprehensive tax policy. It was one of numerous
suggestions then being made for incorporating America into the British
Empire, and extending the imperial power over the continent. Bernard’s
bias is sufficiently revealed in the following:
86. There is no government in America at present, whose powers
are properly balanced; there not being in any of them, a real
and distinct third legislative power mediating between the king
and the people, which is the peculiar excellence of the British
constitution.
87. The want of such a third legislative power, adds weight to the
popular, and lightens the royal scale; so as to destroy the balance
between the royal and popular powers.
88. Although America is not now ... ripe enough for an hereditary
nobility; yet it is now capable of a nobility for life.
89. A nobility appointed by the king for life, and made
independent, would probably give strength and stability to the
American governments, as effectually as an hereditary nobility does
to that of Great Britain.[206]
It is not known to what extent Hutchinson indorsed so ambitious and
comprehensive a plan. For years he had been Bernard’s understudy, and
supported him in all his policies; but being cautious by nature and
attached to local custom, he probably would have rejected the plan
of continental consolidation unless his personal ambition had been
enlisted. Hosmer’s attempt to clear his skirts[207] is not convincing.
Recalling that Hutchinson yielded invariably to royal or ministerial
suggestions, no matter how contrary to local custom, there is no reason
to believe that he would have objected to any coercive program, which
provided adequately for the colonial Tories.
In another matter that touched the political life of Massachusetts
to the quick, Hutchinson was deeply engaged. The source of the power
of the popular party lay in the democratic town meeting. In earlier
days the Tories had made no objection to it, for it was amenable to
control by the “better sort of people.” But under the skillful politics
of Samuel Adams and his fellows, it had become the chief instrument
of opposition, and Hutchinson was determined to cut its claws. On so
delicate a matter, however, it was only to the ministry that he could
speak frankly; he must not appear to be laying a plot against an
institution so long established as a part of the political machinery
of the commonwealth. Under date of March 26, 1770, he wrote to the
secretary of Lord Hillsboro:
There is a Town Meeting, no sort of regard being had to any
qualification of voters, but all the inferior people meet together;
and at a late meeting the inhabitants of other towns who happened
to be in town, mixed with them.... It is in other words being under
the government of the mob. This has given the lower part of the
people such a sense of their importance that a gentleman does not
meet with what used to be common civility, and we are sinking into
perfect barbarism.... If this town could be separated from the rest
of the Province, the infection has not taken such strong hold of
the parts remote from it. The spirit of anarchy which prevails in
Boston is more than I am able to cope with.[208]
Writing to Hillsboro on April 19, 1771, he complained:
In these votes and in most of the public proceedings of the town of
Boston, persons of the best character and estate have little or no
concern. They decline attending Town Meetings where they are sure
to be outvoted by men of the lowest order.[209]
A month later, writing to his old crony, ex-Governor Bernard, he
suggested a remedy which in one form or another he was constantly
holding before the ministry, as an inducement to act:
The town of Boston is the source from whence all the other parts
of the Province derive more or less troubled water. When you
consider what is called its constitution, your good sense will
determine immediately that it never can be otherwise for a long
time together, whilst the majority which conducts all affairs, if
met together upon another occasion, would be properly called a mob,
and are persons of such rank and circumstance as in all communities
constitute a mob, there being no sort of regulation of voters
in practice; and as these will always be most in number, men of
weight and value, although they wish to suppress them, cannot be
induced to attempt to do it for fear not only of being outvoted,
but affronted and insulted. Call such an assembly what you will,
it is really no sort of government, not even a democracy, at best
a corruption of it. There is no hope of a cure by any legislative
but among ourselves [_i.e._, ministerial supporters] to compel the
town to be a corporation.[210] The people will not seek it, because
every one is sensible his importance will be lessened. If ever a
remedy is found, it must be by compelling them to swallow it, and
that by an exterior power,--the Parliament.[211]
In such advice--the destruction of the democratic machinery by an
“exterior power” in order that control of government should lie
beyond the reach of the popular will--we may discover ample grounds
for democratic dissatisfaction with the governor. Hutchinson believed
that when matters of state were settled by gentlemen over their wine,
good government resulted; but when discussed by common people over
their cider, the door was thrown wide open to anarchy. His particular
_bête noire_ was the mob, by which name he designated any gathering
that had not received his gracious permission to assemble. It was his
shortsighted willingness to arm himself with external authority against
his fellow countrymen, that filled the years of his administration
with so much bitterness. The more he lost ground, the more anxiously
he pleaded for help from the ministry. When certain of his private
letters came to the hands of Franklin and were sent home, Hutchinson
was put in a rage. He had long been fearful of such a diplomatic
leak and urged secrecy, for if his private correspondence should
become public, he explained, “I have no security against the rage
of the people.”[212] Much ink was used by his friends in declaiming
against the infamy of making public a gentleman’s private letters,
and Hutchinson characterized it as an “affrontery” such as “was
never known before.” That such private correspondence was in effect
official correspondence, in that it aimed at shaping parliamentary
policy towards Massachusetts, was ignored by these outraged gentlemen.
Diplomats who plan privately rarely like to be read publicly,
especially when the public reads how it is being bought and sold.
Very likely the Assembly overstated the case in declaring that “there
has been, for many years past, measures contemplated, and a plan
formed, by a set of men, born and educated among us, to raise their own
fortunes, and advance themselves to posts of honor and profit, not only
to the destruction of the charter and constitution of this province,
but at the expense of the rights and liberties of the American
colonies.”[213] Hutchinson was too cautious and too conservative to
seek any revolutionary end; at the same time he was too yielding to
make a stand against any encroachment that had legal sanction. From
his narrow mind no help could be expected touching the great matter of
imperial federation. In seeking a way out of the difficulties in which
the British Empire was daily becoming entangled, the royal governor
could discover no wiser plan than the abridgment of fundamental
privileges which a hundred and fifty years of slow growth had made the
peculiar possession of the colonies. The unhappy conclusion towards
which the American Tories were drifting he set forth in words which
were to become the most notorious he ever penned.
I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good
order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of
what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering
that in a remove from a state of nature to the most perfect state
of government, there must be a great restraint of natural liberty.
I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in
which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy
all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never
yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish
to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion
with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach
must prove the ruin of the colony.[214]
Later writers, forgetful of Hutchinson’s self-seeking record-and of
his Tory philosophy, have inclined to leniency in judging him for
his stand on this crucial point. But in spite of his wig and scarlet
broadcloth robes he was only an unintelligent politician, who served
the hand that fed him. No better commentary could be asked than is
found in the caustic remark of the keenest Englishman of his day on
the ministerial policy. In a letter of April, 1777, Horace Walpole
asked, “What politicians are those who have preferred the empty name
of _sovereignty_ to that of _alliance_, and forced subsidies to the
golden ocean of commerce?” Hutchinson was stubborn rather than wise.
He would make no compromise in the matter of sovereignty; there could
be no lawful will but the will of Parliament. “I know of no line that
can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total
independence of the colonies,” he replied to the Assembly, when it was
struggling with the idea of federation.[215] When the Council and House
were outlining a plan of imperial union, and seeking to demonstrate
that the “subordinate authorities” of the colonies were sovereign
within their fields, and “that, in fact, two such powers do subsist
together, and are not incompatible”; the governor with patient finality
explained to them the true “nature of supreme power,”
... and urged, as an undeniable principle, that such a power is
essential in all governments, and that another power, with the
name of subordinate, and with a right to withstand or control the
supreme in particulars, is an absurdity--for it so far ceases
to be subordinate, and becomes itself supreme; that no sensible
writer upon government ever denied what he asserted; and whilst the
council continued to hold, that two supreme powers were compatible,
it would be to no purpose to reason upon the other parts of their
message to him, or to deny what they adduced from a principle so
contrary to reason.[216]
Hutchinson’s position as the King’s representative soon became so
difficult that a wiser man would have resigned. He was constrained
to be the executive of a policy of government by ministerial
instructions. Again and again he vetoed a measure, or dissolved the
legislature, or took action contrary to the spirit of the charter;
and the sole justification which he pleaded was a secret letter of
instructions, the terms of which he refused to make public, and the
object of which must be judged by his acts. “So long as he continued
commander-in-chief,” he replied to the House in one of their perennial
wranglings, “he should think himself bound to conform to every
signification of his majesty’s pleasure.” To the denunciations of the
popular party he remained outwardly indifferent, strong in the supposed
integrity of his official purpose. In time, he believed, the evil
spoken of him by ambitious men would be forgotten, and his course would
find vindication. The words of Bernard might well have been his:
He denies, that the opinion of the whole people of that Province
can now be taken and ascertained, labouring as it does at present,
under the baneful influence of a desperate faction, who by raising
groundless fears and jealousies, by deluding one part of the
people, and by intimidating the other part, has destroyed all real
freedom, not only of action, but even of sentiment and opinion.
But the Respondent doubts not but that his Administration has been
approved by the generally of the best and most respectable men of
the Province.[217]
In spite of Hutchinson’s endeavors to build up a prerogative party
the drift of public opinion went steadily against him until he was
convinced that he stood almost alone. “He was not sure of support from
any one person in authority,” he commented stoically, in telling of
the tea troubles. The Council, the Assembly, the very constables were
against him. Yet he went his way obstinately; he would fulfill to
the last word the instructions of his superiors. The ministry might
be unwise, but better the legal folly of Parliament than the madness
of the democracy. To encroach upon the royal prerogative, Hutchinson
believed was to endanger the nice balance of the constitution. He was
convinced that “the present easy, happy model of government” was as
near perfect as the ingenuity of Englishmen could devise; that the
welfare of America was dependent upon a proper subordination of the
colonies to the mother country; and that the popular party was plotting
treason against their country and their king. The third volume of
his history is a long argument to demonstrate the wisdom of his own
and Bernard’s administrations. The liberal governor, Thomas Pownall,
Hutchinson disliked, partly because of his easy familiar ways, but
chiefly because he was not a prerogative man.[218] But if Pownall
had been in Hutchinson’s place, the history of the relations of
Massachusetts and England would have run very differently.
It was his ingrained snobbery which, more than anything else, brought
about his undoing. The aristocratic governor never differed with a
lord, and rarely agreed with a commoner. It was intolerable to him that
common fellows should dispute his reasoning or sit in judgment upon
his official acts. It was their duty as loyal subjects to obey without
question the mandates of the King’s appointed spokesmen; and when
town-meeting resolutions, put through by mechanics and petty tradesmen,
criticised his conduct, or refused to accept the decision of the
supreme court that the “Boston massacre” was not legally a “massacre,”
he saw in such acts only the madness of the mobocracy. That the people
should suspect the probity of his majesty’s judges was painful to him.
As partisan bitterness increased, he became acutely suspicious of all
who disagreed with him, and shut his mind against every argument. The
debates and resolves in House and Council “abounded with duplicity
and inconclusive reasonings.” “The disingenuity and low craft, which
appeared in so many of the messages, resolves, and other publick
instruments,” he commented, descended “to the level and vulgarity of a
common newspaper essay.”[219] To the leaders of the popular party, the
group of keen debaters and parliamentarians who kept him constantly on
the defense, he attributed an artful malignancy. The fathers of the
Revolution do not appear to advantage in the pages of his history. The
Otises had gone over to the opposition because the father had been
disappointed on the occasion of Hutchinson’s elevation to the coveted
chief-justiceship. John Hancock’s “ruling passion was a fondness for
popular applause.... His natural powers were moderate, and had been
very little improved by study.” John Adams was a man whose “ambition
was without bounds.... He could not look with complacency upon any man
who was in possession of more wealth, more honours, or more knowledge
than himself,” and he went over to the opposition because of a slight
upon him by refusal of a place on the bench. For Samuel Adams, his
most relentless enemy, Hutchinson’s hatred was boundless. He had
defaulted as collector of taxes and for equivalent of his arrears of
public money he had set up as defender of the public liberties, and he
“made more converts by calumniating governors, and other servants of
the crown, than by strength of reasoning.” His main business in life
was “robbing men of their characters.”
It is unlikely that time will bring any vindication of the later career
of Thomas Hutchinson. He was a stiff-necked official of scrupulous
principle, whose principles were grossly reactionary. He was sincerely
attached to the great ideal of imperial unity, but he conceived of
that unity as embodied in the coercive sovereignty of the crown and
parliament, with Tory gentlemen as exclusive administrators. Samuel
Adams was not unjust in declaring, “It has been his principle from a
boy that mankind are to be governed by the discerning few; and it has
ever since been his ambition to be the hero of the few.” Courteous
and conscientious, with very considerable administrative ability, it
was his misfortune to defend a social philosophy alien to the rough
individualism of his fellow countrymen. He would think only in terms
of imperial centralization, and they would think only in terms of
local home rule. He conceived of the political state as a private
preserve for gentlemen to hunt over, and they conceived of it as a free
hunting-ground for all. He never understood the assertive, capitalistic
America that was rising about him, and in joining issue with it he
destroyed himself. “If we were not mad,” he lamented, “I have no doubt
we might enjoy all that liberty which can subsist with a state of
government.” It was the complaint of the Tory upon a democracy that
preferred self-rule to the blessings of a trusteeship, which, like a
lawyers’ squabble, consumed the estate in fees. Quite evidently the
“mobility,” in the days of Thomas Hutchinson, was running into madness,
for it demanded greater liberty than was compatible with a “state of
government” sanctioned by crown officials--a fact which the royal
governor grieved over but was helpless to restrain.
II • Daniel Leonard • Tory Lawyer
Probably the most finished prose writer, certainly one of the most
cultivated minds, among the notable group of American Loyalists, was a
young man of excellent family, who if events had turned out otherwise
would have made a much greater name for himself. Daniel Leonard was a
Harvard graduate and a member of the Boston bar, an effective speaker,
of some weight in commonwealth politics, and aligned with Hutchinson,
Sewall, and the crown party. In temperament and taste he seems to have
been conspicuously aristocratic. He delighted in fine clothes and
set up his coach and pair to drive from his countryseat to Boston--a
gesture of opulence that excited the laughter of sober people, and led
Mercy Warren to introduce him into her comedy, _The Group_, under the
name of Beau Trumps. According to John Adams, who was a decided gossip,
it was this cavalier love of display that led to his political undoing,
overcoming his native sympathy with the party of revolution.
He wore a broad gold lace round the rim of his hat, he made his
cloak glitter with laces still broader, he had set up his chariot
and pair and constantly traveled in it from Taunton to Boston. This
made the world stare--it was a novelty. Not another lawyer in the
province, attorney or barrister, of whatever age, reputation, rank,
or station, presumed to ride in a coach or chariot. The discerning
ones soon perceived that wealth and power must have charms to
a heart that delighted in so much finery, and indulged in such
unusual expense. Such marks could not escape the vigilant eyes of
the two arch-tempters, Hutchinson and Sewall, who had more art,
insinuation, and address, than all the rest of their party.[220]
Under the pen name of “Massachusettensis,” Leonard published a series
of weekly letters addressed to “the Inhabitants of the Province of
Massachusetts Bay,” running from December 12, 1774, to April 3, 1775,
a fortnight before the affair at Lexington. They were begun soon after
the adjournment of the Continental Congress, and may be taken as the
final statement of the Tory argument. They were exceedingly skillful
partisan pamphlets, adapted with great adroitness to current prejudices
and old loyalties. Their main appeal was to the psychology of the
colonial, and if the springs of that psychology had not been sapped
by the rising liberalism, the appeal would have been extraordinarily
persuasive. Probably the King’s cause was never presented more
convincingly, and the American Tories were delighted with the
letters. “On my return from Congress,” said John Adams, “I found
the Massachusetts Gazette teeming with political speculations, and
Massachusettensis shining like the moon among the lesser stars.”[221]
He at once replied to them under the pen name “Novanglus,” beginning
with a slashing attack in which the seventeenth-century republicans
are called in to refute Leonard, and then reciting some plain facts
about the British government and its American spokesman, which somewhat
tarnished the latter’s eulogies. But he soon strayed off into abstract
disquisition, and the controversy was brought to an abrupt end with the
news from Lexington.
As in most Loyalist pamphlets, Leonard’s appeal was primarily to
the law and the constitution, and it is tagged with references to
statutes like a proper lawyer’s brief. But underlying the argument is a
political philosophy which fairly represents the current Tory theory.
The immediate purpose of the Letters was to make the rebellious spirit
of the colonial Whigs toward their lawful sovereign appear both wicked
and groundless, dangerous to the peace and well-being of society and
inspired by the personal ambitions of demagogues. This major purpose
involved him in two main arguments: first, on the heinousness of
rebellion in general; and second, on the special heinousness of the
Whig leaders. Leonard’s political philosophy is implied rather than
elaborated. With other American Loyalists he evaded broad principles;
nevertheless his total argument rests on a philosophical foundation too
well known to be glossed over. He derived immediately from Hobbes, and
he follows the _Leviathan_ in his exaltation of the sovereign state.
Men in a state of nature, he argued, live in a condition of anarchy,
with the hand of all against all. Amid such chaos civilization is
impossible, and the common need of security for person and property
impelled men to erect the coercive state as an instrument of social
protection. It first arose and has since been maintained from the
necessity of holding in check the spirit of anarchy which continually
threatens from the ambitions of designing men. This is the great danger
that lies always in wait, ready to destroy society. Government is a
guarantee of the protection of the weak against the strong, and every
friend of law and order must enlist his loyalty on the side of the
lawful prince against all who would foment rebellion; for rebellion is
the mischief-maker that unlooses all the evils of Pandora’s box.
This was no more than the familiar stock-in-trade of the Tory,
nevertheless Leonard becomes quite terrifying in describing the evils
of sedition:
Rebellion is the most atrocious offence, that can be perpetrated
by man, save those which are committed more immediately against
the supreme Governor of the Universe who is the avenger of his
own cause. It dissolves the social band, annihilates the security
resulting from law and government; introduces fraud, violence,
rapine, murder, sacrilege, and the long train of evils, that riot,
uncontrouled, in a state of nature. Allegiance and protection are
reciprocal. The subject is bound by the compact to yield obedience
to government, and in return, is entitled to protection from it;
thus the poor are protected against the rich; the weak against
the strong; the individual against the many; and this protection
is guaranteed to each member, by the whole community. But when
government is laid prostrate, a state of war, of all against all,
commences; might overcomes right; innocence itself has no security,
unless the individual sequesters himself from his fellowmen,
inhabits his own cave, and seeks his own prey. This is what is
called a state of nature.[222]
The “seeds of sedition” having been sown, they spring up and bring
forth fruits of death; the “people are led to sacrifice real liberty to
licentiousness, which gradually ripens into rebellion and civil war.”
And what is still more to be lamented, the generality of the
people, who are thus made the dupes of artifice, and the mere
stilts of ambition, are sure to be losers in the end. The best
they can expect, is to be thrown neglected by, when they are no
longer wanted; but they are seldom so happy; if they are subdued,
confiscation of estate and ignominious death are their portion;
if they conquer, their own army is often turned upon them, to
subjugate them to a more tyrannical government than that they
rebelled against.[223]
Leonard then proceeds to supplement the Hobbesian argument by an
elaborate appeal to the history of English law, and discovers ample
sanction in a recital of a long list of statutory enactments and
court decisions against the evil of sedition. As treason is the
gravest social crime, so it has always been visited with the severest
punishments. He states the history of legislation against treason, and
points out how the statutes have been construed to reach so far as to
embrace the gathering of private men in a warlike manner, with a design
to redress public grievances or to better their economic condition. He
makes a parade of the brutal laws of feudal times, and the decisions
of Tudor and Stuart judges, justifying those pronouncements as a
necessary defense of society against sedition-mongers and their
subversive ambitions. By a natural transition he brings the argument
home to his American readers. The aims and methods of the Whigs, he
contends, constitute a clear violation of the law of treason. They are
playing with the gallows, with their Committees of Correspondence--“the
foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent that ever issued from the
eggs of sedition,” and the imperative need of the hour was to put a
stop to all treasonable thought and action.
I saw the small seed of sedition, when it was implanted; it was, as
a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant until it has become
a great tree; the vilest reptiles that crawl upon the earth, are
concealed at the root; the foulest birds of the air rest upon its
branches. I now would induce you to go to work immediately with
axes and hatchets, and cut it down, for a twofold reason; because
it is a pest to society, and lest it be felled suddenly by a
stronger arm and crush thousands in the fall.[224]
From the first major proposition, that all sedition is heinous, Leonard
passed to his second, that the sedition of the American Whigs was
peculiarly wicked, for it was grounded in no injustice on the part of
England. If loyalty is the highest social virtue, that loyalty might
justly be claimed by Great Britain as her due. “Has she not been a
nursing mother to us, from the days of our infancy to this time? Has
she not been indulgent almost to a fault?” The Whigs, he asserted
broadly, have been patching together their supposed grievances out of
cloth that never came from an English loom. It is the shoddiest of
homespun, mean, and shameful.
We had always considered ourselves, as a part of the British
empire, and the parliament, as the supreme legislature of the
whole. Acts of parliament for regulating our internal policy were
familiar. We had paid postage agreeable to act of parliament, ...
duties imposed for regulating trade, and even for raising a revenue
to the crown without questioning the right, though we closely
adverted to the rate or quantum. We knew that in all those acts of
government, the good of the whole had been consulted, and whenever
through want of information any thing grievous had been ordained,
we were sure of obtaining redress by a proper representation of
it. We were happy in our subordination; but in an evil hour, under
the influence of a malignant planet, the design was formed of
opposing the stamp-act, by a denial of the right of parliament to
make it.[225]
Our patriots exclaim, “that humble and reasonable petitions from
the representatives of the people have been frequently treated
with contempt.” This is as virulent a libel upon his majesty’s
government, as falsehood and ingenuity combined could fabricate.
Our humble and reasonable petitions have not only been ever
graciously received, when the established mode of exhibiting
them has been observed, but generally granted. Applications of
a different kind, have been treated with neglect, though not
always with the contempt they deserved. These either originated in
illegal assemblies, and could not be received without implicitly
countenancing such enormities, or contained such matter, and
were conceived in such terms, as to be at once an insult to his
majesty, and a libel on his government. Instead of being decent
remonstrances against real grievances, or prayers for their
removal, they were insidious attempts to wrest from the crown, or
the supreme legislature, their inherent, unalienable prerogatives
or rights.[226]
The prerogative might not be argued, according to Leonard, nor the
sovereignty of parliament discussed, for any such comment was “an
insult to his majesty, and a libel on his government.” The illegal
Continental Congress had done both and thereby proved itself seditious.
The prince, or sovereign, as some writers call the supreme
authority of a state, is sufficiently ample and extensive to
provide a remedy for every wrong, in all possible emergencies and
contingencies; and consequently a power, that is not derived from
such authority, springing up in a state, must encroach upon it,
and in proportion as the usurpation enlarges itself, the rightful
prince must be diminished; indeed, they cannot long subsist
together, but must continually militate, till one or the other be
destroyed.[227]
The true animus of the Whig attack upon the nice balance of the British
constitution Leonard professed to discover in a dangerous republican
ambition. From the beginning there had been an excess of the democratic
element in the charters and practice of many of the colonies; and this
overbalance must in the end be rectified.
Our council boards are as destitute of the constitutional authority
of the house of lords, as their several members are of the noble
independence, and splendid appendages of peerage. The house of
peers is the bulwark of the British constitution, and through
successive ages, has withstood the shocks of monarchy, and the
sappings of democracy, and the constitution gained strength by the
conflict.[228]
Lacking a peerage, which Leonard regrets, but which will come with
time, American political practice is less stable than the English,
more exposed to “the sappings of democracy”; but necessary steps have
already been taken to stabilize it. The hands of the royal governor and
judges have been strengthened against the democratic House, and “town
meetings are restrained to prevent their passing traitorous resolves.”
The ideal towards which America must travel as fast as circumstance and
the colonial temper will permit, is the wise balance of the English
government, with local powers vested in colonial lords and commons,
supervised by the King and the Imperial Parliament. In the midst of
these present agitations, wickedly fomented by Whig smugglers--“a
smuggler and a whig are cousin germans, the offspring of two sisters,
avarice and ambition”--it should be remembered that “the terms whig
and tory have been adopted according to the arbitrary use of them in
this province, but they rather ought to be reversed; an American tory
is a supporter of our excellent constitution, and an American whig a
subverter of it.” To bring these American subverters of the glorious
British constitution to a sense of their obligations, Leonard refers
them to the words of James Otis written ten years before:
It is a maxim, that the king can do no wrong; and every good
subject is bound to believe his king is not inclined to do any. We
are blessed with a prince who has given abundant demonstrations,
that in all his actions, he studies the good of his people, and
the true glory of his crown, which are inseparable. It would
therefore be the highest degree of impudence and disloyalty, to
imagine that the king, at the head of his parliament, could have
any but the most pure and perfect intentions of justice, goodness
and truth, that human nature is capable of. All this I say and
believe of the king and parliament, in all their acts; even in that
which so nearly affects the interests of the colonists; and that a
most perfect and ready obedience is to be yielded to it while it
remains in force. The power of parliament is uncontroulable but
by themselves, and we must obey. They can only repeal their own
acts. There would be an end of all government, if one or a number
of subjects, or subordinate provinces should take upon them so
far to judge of the justice of an act of parliament, as to refuse
obedience to it. If there was nothing else to restrain such a step,
prudence ought to do it, for forcibly resisting the parliament and
the king’s laws is high treason. Therefore let the parliament lay
what burdens they please on us, we must, it is our duty to submit
and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve
us.[229]
The argument comes back finally to a threat; sovereignty rests not on
good will but on coercion. The insincerity and unreality of the Tory
appeal are only too patent. Those old pleaders were true to their
breeding and their interests, for they regarded fact as little as
a modern diplomat. They ignored or denied open and plain evidence.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the weakness of Leonard’s argument become
more evident than in his refusal to admit the theoretical right of
revolution. He professed allegiance to a king whose claim to the crown
rested on revolution, and was justified by the apostle of Whiggery,
Locke. But nowhere does he refer to Locke, and not until he was
prodded by John Adams, who insisted that the Whig principles were “the
principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sydney,
Harrington and Locke,” did he concede that any other interpretation of
revolution than the Hobbesian, was justifiable. In his last paper, of
April 3, 1775, he replied to Adams thus:
I hold the rights of the people as sacred, and revere the
principles, that have established the succession to the imperial
crown of Great Britain, in the line of the illustrious house of
Brunswick; but that the difficulty lies in applying them to the
cause of the whigs ... for admitting that the collective body
of the people, that are subject to the British empire, have an
inherent right to change their form of government, or race of
kings, it does not follow, that the inhabitants of a single
province, or of a number of provinces, or any given part under a
majority of the whole empire, have such a right. By admitting that
the less may rule or sequester themselves from the greater, we
unhinge all government.[230]
By such logic does he whittle away the doctrine of the right of
revolution. As a lawyer Daniel Leonard discovered a distinction between
the Continental Congress of 1774 and the Revolutionary Convention
of 1689, which rendered the former treasonable and the latter
glorious. But the rising liberalism of America could see no such nice
distinction, and a year later the brilliant young lawyer was forced to
withdraw to Halifax. He was rewarded by a grateful King with the post
of chief justice of Bermuda, lived to be nearly ninety, and died in
London in 1829, one of the last of the exiled Loyalists.
III • Jonathan Boucher • Tory Priest
The extremest expression of American Toryism came not unfittingly from
an Anglican priest. The English church has always been the mother
of loyalty, and Jonathan Boucher of Virginia and Maryland was the
spiritual son of a notable line of bishops and priests who upheld the
royal prerogative through evil times and good, throwing the august
sanction of religion about the monarchical state. A fearless, capable,
outspoken man was this English-born southerner, taking counsel of
his own thought, not over-tolerant of those who differed with him,
holding himself _in loco parentis_ to his parishioners, and exacting
obedience from them. He was another Increase Mather, with the same love
of domination, the same directness of purpose and strength of will. A
man of conspicuous parts and equally conspicuous position: not only a
clergyman, but a gentleman of affairs, owner of a large plantation and
many slaves, concerned with public business and a volunteer statesman:
a sort of unofficial adviser and secretary to draft provincial laws.
Above all of independent mind. He would truckle to no man, and he
subjected the opinions of his neighbors to the same scrutiny that he
gave his own. For the popular orator and the demagogue he had frank
contempt, and mass prejudices and mob power held no terrors for him.
There was both courage and futility in his free, outspoken career.
He refused to be intimidated or turned aside by popular disfavor.
“For more than six months I preached, when I did preach, with a pair
of loaded pistols lying on the cushions; having given notice that if
any one attempted, what had long been threatened, to drag me out of
the pulpit, I should think myself justified in repelling violence by
violence.” One day he promptly knocked down a burly blacksmith who
had been set on him, but there came a time when his church was filled
with armed men, and his friends, fearing for his life, held him back
forcibly from mounting the pulpit. That episode marked the end of his
career in America. He had plainly become obsolete, and he was driven
home to his native England. There as an old man, he published in 1797
thirteen sermons, preached in America between 1763 and 1775, with
an historical preface, under the title, _A View of the Causes and
Consequences of the American Revolution_, and dedicated to his old
neighbor and friend, General Washington.
The political philosophy of Jonathan Boucher, as elaborated in
these discourses, is frank and unequivocal. It is the voice of
seventeenth-century Cavalier England, speaking to an alien people, bred
up in another philosophy of government. Church and state, the Bible and
the British constitution, the divine authority of God and the divine
authority of the _status quo_, have got themselves curiously fused--and
confused--in the mind of this disciple of Laud. It was the result
not of ignorance but of conviction. When the revolutionary movement
began to make a stir about him, the parish priest took the situation
seriously and set about preparing himself to cope with it. Before then
he had been no student of political theory, but now he turned to his
books. “With sincerity in my heart, and my Bible in my hand,” he said,
“I sat down to explore the truth ... to read and study what had been
collected and laid down on the subject of government by writers ...
who got their materials ... from the only pure sources of information,
the law of God, and the law of the land.”[231] The restriction in his
choice of writers is suggestive of his bias; it eliminated at one
stroke the main body of political speculation, not only the English
thinkers of the preceding century, but the continental followers of the
natural-rights school. Actually, however, Boucher did not limit himself
so narrowly, for he refers frequently to Locke, and he was fairly
familiar with the main doctrines of the revolutionary philosophy. But
his most cherished discovery was Sir Robert Filmer’s _Patriarcha_,
and having digested Filmer’s quaint theory, thenceforth he remained a
confirmed patriarchist. The absurd jumble of Hebraic precedent and Tory
prejudice which Filmer had laboriously put together and which Locke had
knocked to pieces, was wholly convincing to this belated advocate of
divine right, who proceeded to wipe the dust off the precious volume
and expound its doctrines to an amazed congregation.
The single and sacred duty of the subject, Jonathan Boucher was
convinced, is faithful obedience to the powers that are set over him.
Those powers derive from God and are instituted for the subject’s good.
It follows, therefore, that the unpardonable sin is rebellion against
lawfully constituted authority. “The doctrine of _obedience for
conscience sake_,” he asserted, “is ... the great _cornerstone_ of all
good government.”[232] With Daniel Leonard he makes much of it, but he
appeals rather to the sanctions of religion than to the law.
Obedience to Government is every man’s duty, because it is every
man’s interest; but it is particularly incumbent on Christians,
because ... it is enjoined by the positive commands of God....
If the form of government under which the good providence of God
has been pleased to place us be mild and free, it is our duty to
enjoy it with gratitude and with thankfulness.... If it be less
indulgent and less liberal than in reason it ought to be, still it
is our duty not to disturb the peace of the community, by becoming
refractory and rebellious subjects, and _resisting the ordinances
of God_.[233]
Those great and good men, who, _like wise master-builders_,
have from time to time so _fitly framed together_ our glorious
Constitution, well knew that _other sure foundation no man could
lay_ than ... obedience, not only _for wrath_, but _for conscience
sake_.[234]
Because this spirit of obedience was openly flouted in America, where
every influence made for rough individual liberty, Jonathan Boucher
feared for the future. Loose principles were abroad, notions of popular
sovereignty under the majority will, that must give “rise to a low and
unworthy opinion of government,” unless the people were recalled to
their duty. Particularly dangerous, he thought, was “that loose notion
respecting government, which has long been disseminated among the
people at large with incredible industry, namely, that all government
is the mere creature of the people, and may therefore be tampered with,
altered, new-modelled, set up or pulled down, just as tumultuous crowds
of the most disorderly persons in the community (who on such occasions
are always so forward to call themselves _the people_) may happen in
some giddy moments of overheated ardour to determine.”[235]
The unhappy results of such evil principles Boucher saw spread
through America. With the insidious undermining of respect for
law and government, the vicious conception of republicanism made
its appearance. “Everything in America had a republican aspect,”
he commented in after years; and he agreed with Bernard that “the
splitting America into many small governments weakened the governing
power, and strengthened that of the people.”[236] If Parliament had
been wise enough to consolidate government in America, drawing it to a
single head, and investing it with dignity and authority, the country
would not have become, like revolutionary France, “a mean and odious
republic.” As a minister and a loyal British subject, Jonathan Boucher
would not seduce the American people “by any flowery panegyrics on
liberty. Such panegyrics are the productions of ancient heathens and
modern patriots: nothing of the kind is to be met with in the Bible,
nor in the Statute Book. The word _liberty_, as meaning civil liberty,
does not, I believe, occur in all the Scriptures.”[237]
To respect the laws, is to respect liberty in the only rational
sense in which the term can be used; for liberty consists in
subserviency to law. “Where there is no law,” says Mr. Locke,
“there is no freedom.”... True liberty, then, is a liberty to do
everything that is right, and the being restrained from doing
anything that is wrong.[238]
The evils which flow from disrespect for authority carry much further
than the unsettling of the political _status quo_; they end by
overturning the entire social order. If any group or class rejects
the divine plan according to which God has set each in its due place,
society as a whole is involved in strife that may lapse into anarchy.
It was an unhappy scene, prophesying an unhappier future, that the
minister beheld in contemporary America.
There never was a time when a whole people were so little governed
by settled good principles.... Both employers and the employed,
much to their mutual shame and inconvenience, no longer live
together with anything like attachment and cordiality on either
side; and the laboring classes, instead of regarding the rich as
their guardians, patrons, and benefactors, now look on them as so
many overgrown colossuses whom it is no demerit in them to wrong.
A still more general ... topic of complaint is, that the lower
classes, instead of being industrious, frugal, and orderly (virtues
so peculiarly becoming their station in life) are become idle,
improvident, and dissolute.[239]
With social morality thus dangerously undermined, the Americans were
a natural prey to demagogues, who filled the land with their clamor
of patriotism and liberty. The situation in Virginia was peculiarly
dangerous by reason of long-standing debts to English merchants which
the planters were unable to pay; they found themselves in consequence,
impaled on the horns of an unhappy dilemma, “to be loyal and be ruined,
or to rebel and be damned.”[240]
Instructed by the colonial troubles, Jonathan Boucher elaborated a
theory of the true origin and purpose of government, a theory taken
straight out of Filmer, which he expands thus:
As soon as there were some to be governed, there were also some to
govern.... The first father was the first king: and ... it was thus
that all government originated, and monarchy is the most ancient
form.[241]
The glory of God is much concerned, that there should be good
government in the world: it is, therefore, the uniform doctrine
of the Scriptures, that it is under the deputation and authority
of God alone that _kings reign and princes decree justice_. Kings
and princes (which are only other words for supreme magistrates)
were doubtless created and appointed, not so much for their own
sakes, as for the sake of the people committed to their charge: yet
they are not, therefore, the creatures of the people. So far from
deriving their authority from any supposed consent or suffrage of
men, they receive their commission from Heaven; they receive it
from God, the source and original of all power.[242]
Instituted by God and functioning under divine sanction, government
becomes, therefore, a divine instrument, for the security of which He
is greatly concerned: “Everything our blessed Lord either said or did,
pointedly tended to discourage the disturbing a settled government.”
“Unless we are good subjects, we cannot be good Christians.” Jesus
“thought it would be better, both for Judea in particular, and for
the world in general, that ... the people should not be distracted
by a revolution, and ... that there should be no precedent to which
revolutionists might appeal.” “The only very intolerable grievance in
government is, when men allow themselves to disturb and destroy the
peace of the world, by vain attempts to render that perfect, which
the laws of our nature have ordained to be imperfect.” “To suffer
nobly indicates more greatness of mind than can be shown by acting
valiantly.”[243] Jonathan Boucher was the high Tory of the Tory cause
in America. He refused to strike his flag to the pirate craft of
republicanism; he would not truckle to newfangled notions; but stood up
stoutly to be counted for God and the King. In laying bare the heart
of Toryism, he unwittingly gave aid and comfort to the detested cause
of liberalism. It is reasonable to assume that such militant loyalty
to the outworn doctrine of passive submission was a real disservice to
the ministry, for it revealed the prerogative in a light peculiarly
offensive to American prejudices. What a godsend to the liberals was
such doctrine on the lips of so eminent a divine!
Footnotes
[202] _Diary and Letters_, Vol. I, pp. 46-48.
[203] See Hosmer, _Life of Samuel Adams_, p. 259.
[204] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 255.
[205] “Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives to the King,” in _Works of Samuel Adams_, Vol. I, pp.
365-367.
[206] Quoted in John Adams, _Novanglus_, Second Letter.
[207] See his _Life of Thomas Hutchinson_.
[208] Quoted in _ibid._, p. 189.
[209] _Ibid._, p. 206.
[210] Hutchinson assumes the act of incorporation will lay restrictions
upon the right of suffrage and the powers of the town meeting.
[211] _Ibid._, pp. 206-207.
[212] _Ibid._, p. 199.
[213] _Resolves of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay_,
June 16, 1773.
[214] _Ibid._, p. 436. Compare the view of Van Tyne, _The Causes of the
War of Independence_, p. 85.
[215] Speech of January 6, 1773.
[216] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, pp. 381-382.
[217] _Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives._
[218] For Hutchinson’s statement of the Tory case, see Vol. III, pp.
352-355.
[219] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 399.
[220] _Works_, Vol. X, pp. 194-195; quoted in Tyler, _Literary History
of the American Revolution_, Vol. I, Chapter XVI.
[221] Preface to _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_, 1819.
[222] Letter of February 6, 1775, in _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_,
pp. 187-188.
[223] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.
[224] Letter of January 2, in _ibid._, p. 159.
[225] Letter of December 19, in _ibid._, p. 147.
[226] Letter of March 27, in _ibid._, pp. 217-218.
[227] _Ibid._, p. 219.
[228] Letter of January 9, in _ibid._, p. 171.
[229] Letter of January 23, in _ibid._, p. 181.
[230] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[231] _A View of the Causes, etc._, p. 591.
[232] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[233] _Ibid._, pp. 507-508.
[234] _Ibid._, p. 306.
[235] _Ibid._, p. 313.
[236] _Ibid._, p. xliv.
[237] _Ibid._, p. 504.
[238] _Ibid._, pp. 509 and 511.
[239] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[240] _Ibid._, Preface, p. xlii.
[241] _Ibid._, p. 525.
[242] _Ibid._, p. 534.
[243] _Ibid._, pp. 535, 538, 542, 543.
Chapter III • John Dickinson • The Mind of the American Whig
For many colonials it was a hard and bitter choice that was thrust
upon them by the political situation. They had no wish to choose
between loyalty to the British Empire and love for their native land.
So long as the quarrel remained a legal dispute over parliamentary
encroachments, colonial sentiment was fairly united in opposition to
the ministerial policy; differences of opinion arose over methods of
defense, rather than the need of it. The threatened loss of home rule
drew together radical and conservative. Although Governor Hutchinson
asserted that the feeling against England was the work of a small
populistic element--“in Massachusetts Bay the exception to the
constitutional authority of Parliament was first taken, and principally
supported, by men who were before discontented”[244]--it is clear
that the active Tory party numbered at first few more than the royal
officials and their beneficiaries. But when it came to the point of
severing colonial relations with the mother country, comparatively few
among the upper classes in the northern and middle colonies went with
the party of independence. The moderate men, the conciliationists,
were crushed between the two extremes, and the Tory party was greatly
increased in numbers and influence.
Of this moderate party of conciliationists, the outstanding figure
during the years of tedious debate was John Dickinson, of Philadelphia.
His _Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_, published between December 2,
1767, and February 15, 1768, created considerable stir both in America
and England, and if Hutchinson may be trusted, they “formed a temporary
political creed for the colonies.” Later he was chief draftsman of a
notable series of state papers: the Declaration of Rights of the Stamp
Act Congress; the two Petitions to the King and the Address to the
Inhabitants of Quebec of the first Continental Congress; and finally
the Articles of Confederation. Professor Tyler has fastened upon
him the title of “penman of the Revolution”; but a juster title, and
more in accord with the facts, would be “spokesman of the Colonial
Whigs.” From his first entrance into public life to the adoption of
the Constitution, Dickinson was a consistent advocate of the political
philosophy of which John Pym was the early representative, Locke
the philosophical defender, and Pitt the parliamentary advocate--a
philosophy which he accepted as the final embodiment of the long
struggle for English freedom.
English Whiggery has been fortunate in its advocates. It has been
expounded with great fervor and glossed with much eloquence. Its ends
have been so persistently proclaimed as at one with the cause of human
liberty, that in the mind of English-speaking people it early became
synonymous with English liberalism. In so far as it represented a
protest against divine right, such an interpretation was historically
just. It was the expression of a rising class, and every rising class
in its ostensible program professes to be liberal. But in the outcome
Whiggery proved to be very different from generic liberalism. Examined
critically the program of Whiggery is seen to have been compounded
of substantial economic interests. Although the Whig party created
the modern House of Commons and ministerial government, and wrote
into the British constitution the principle of no taxation without
representation, back of such revolutionary changes was a middle-class,
property theory of society. It laid down as the first principle of
political science the dogma that government is instituted for the
protection of property; and it advanced by inevitable stages to the
position that government should use its powers to extend the field of
profitable operations and safeguard exploitation, the natural outcome
of which was a policy of imperialism. On the pretense of furthering
human liberty it carried the British flag and British goods to the ends
of the earth. The great Pitt, grandson of the unscrupulous exploiter of
India, completed the work begun by John Pym more than a century before;
the American Revolution was the natural sequence of an imperialistic
policy begun by Cromwell’s Navigation Act, which, aimed immediately
at the Dutch carriers, put the power of the government behind British
shipping to the disadvantage of American competitors.
The philosophy of Whiggery had spread widely in America before the
Revolution and numbered among its advocates probably the great
majority of thoughtful Americans. Of these John Dickinson became
the best known, although he was certainly not the ablest--less
able, indeed, than his fellow Marylander, Daniel Dulany. Of Quaker
extraction, Dickinson was a country gentleman who inherited broad
acres, an honorable name, and high social position. His dignified
standing was further assured by his marriage with the only surviving
child of Isaac Norris, long Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and
the most influential amongst a little group of wealthy merchants who
had long ruled the commonwealth in patriarchal fashion. By his wife he
came into possession of Fairhill, a country place of several hundred
acres on the outskirts of Philadelphia, one of the show places of the
city, of which the mansion with its stately façade, its waxed floors
and red-cedar wainscoting, its books and paintings and statuary,
its setting of gardens and fishponds and conservatories, was vastly
impressive to a world that loved dignified display.
With such advantages of wealth and position he could hardly fail to
get on in his profession, and within a short time after his return
from the Inns of Court at London, where he had his training in the
law, he became one of the leaders of the Philadelphia bar and was
soon deep in commonwealth politics. He was a gentleman in a society
of gentlemen and preferment came easily to him. His natural parts
were respectable, he had improved himself by considerable reading in
history and politics, he possessed a cultivated pen and some facility
in debate. He understood commercial problems, could talk trade, was
ready with statistics of imports and exports, and was an advocate of
the paper money which Philadelphia merchants had discovered to be a
stimulus to business. Among his intimate friends were Robert Morris,
Thomas Willing, and George Clymer, representatives of the younger
generation of Philadelphians, whose speculative enterprises were not
approved by their conservative elders. And so by consequence he became
the spokesman of the mercantile interests in their remonstrance against
the ministerial policies.
But Dickinson was more than a legal adviser to clients who were in
trade. As lawyer and statesman he was true to the best traditions of
the English law and the British constitution, faithful to what he
conceived to be the larger interests of the British Empire. In all his
public acts he was animated by a scrupulous sense of duty, swerving no
whit from the line of conduct marked out by his principles in spite
of the clamor of opposition. From first to last he seems to have been
guided by a fine sense of responsible stewardship that came to him
from his English heritage. Certainly the dignity of John Dickinson
and the integrity of his political career suffer little by contrast
with certain popular representatives who governed their conduct by
expediency rather than principle. The great ideal of imperial unity
possessed him completely, and he would do nothing to bring it into
jeopardy. He sacrificed his great influence with the radicals by his
refusal to go with the majority for independence; he would not assist
in disrupting the British Empire even though he could not preserve it.
The refusal was difficult and it destroyed his popularity in a moment.
He withdrew from active participation in political affairs, and for
years afterwards, to the eyes of former associates, his conduct seemed
to have been pusillanimous.
By temperament and breeding Dickinson was a conservative, and this
native bias was emphasized by his English training in the law. The
lawyers of the middle and southern colonies were far better trained
than those of New England. Many were from the Inns of Court, where
they had steeped themselves in the Common Law and had imbibed profound
respect for the orderly processes of English legal procedure.
They found intellectual satisfaction in tracing the evolution of
constitutional practice, and their methods of thought were too strictly
legal to suffer them to stray into the domain of extra-legal political
speculation. Their appeal was to the law and the constitution; never to
abstract principles. If, on the other hand, the revolutionary leaders
of New England--and Virginians like Jefferson and Patrick Henry--were
poorer lawyers they were better political scientists, for their legal
training had been too casual and too scanty to contract their minds to
statutes and precedents. Jefferson and John Adams were alike in this
respect; their interests were speculative rather than legal; and they
wrote more convincingly when defending the principles of Locke than in
expounding Coke.
But John Dickinson remained always the lawyer. The English political
thinkers of the seventeenth century scarcely touched the fringe of
his mind. In consequence his writings are a long constitutional
argument. He rarely refers to political authorities. The philosophy of
Locke--whom he had read--is largely ignored, and Hume--“this great man
whose political speculations are so much admired”--is quoted only in
support of a constitutional interpretation. “The constitutional modes
of relief are those I wish to see pursued on the present occasion,” he
insisted in reply to the natural-rights advocates, and the attitude
is eloquent of the man. This scrupulous legalism he carried to such
lengths that when the new constitution for Pennsylvania was adopted he
refused to take office under it because he doubted the legality of the
convention that framed it.
With such temperament and training Dickinson would seem to have had the
making of an excellent Tory in him. What cause had he to quarrel with
Great Britain, and why should he have risked his lot with the party
of protest? It was not because he denied the ministerial theory of
parliamentary sovereignty in America, for he acknowledged both the fact
and the necessity for such sovereignty:
He, who considers these provinces as states distinct from the
_British Empire_, has very slender notions of _justice_, or of
their _interests_. We are but parts of a _whole_ and therefore
there must exist a power somewhere to preside, and preserve the
connection in due order. This power is lodged in the parliament;
and we are as much dependent on _Great-Britain_ as a perfectly free
people can be on another.[245]
Nor was it because of old trade grievances--shipping restrictions, the
spying of customs officers, prohibitions laid on manufactures, and the
like. He accepted without challenge the English mercantile view of the
economic relations of colonies to the mother country, and he professed
to see in existing trade regulations only the incidental and necessary
burdens of a system both salutary and just; he had no protest to urge
against the principle of the Navigation Acts.
Colonies have been settled by the nations of _Europe_ for the
purposes of trade. These purposes were to be attained, by the
colonies raising for their mother country those things which she
did not produce herself; and by supplying themselves from her
with things they wanted. These were the _national objects_, in
the commencement of our colonies, and have been uniformly so in
their promotion.... The parent country, with undeviating prudence
and virtue, attentive to the first principles of colonization,
drew to herself the benefits she might reasonably expect, and
preserved to her children the blessings, on which those benefits
were founded. She made laws, obliging her colonies to carry to
her all those products which she wanted for her own use; and all
those raw materials which she chose herself to work up. Besides
this restriction, she forbad them to procure _manufactures_ from
any other part of the globe, or even the _products_ of _European_
countries, which alone could rival her, without first being brought
to her. In short, by a variety of laws, she regulated their trade
in such a manner as she thought most conducive to their mutual
advantage, and her own welfare.[246]
Not only did Dickinson concede to the mother country the right to
regulate the entire system of colonial trade and industry to the
primary advantage of British merchants, even going so far as to justify
it by a false historical explanation of the rise of the colonies; not
only did he profess to believe that such regulation had been exercised
in a spirit of unselfish concern for the well-being of the empire; but
he professed a faith in the King and the English people that suggests
Hutchinson and Bernard. Consider such naïve adulation as the following:
We have an excellent prince, in whose good dispositions towards us
we may confide. We have a generous, sensible and humane nation,
to whom we may apply. They may be deceived. They may, by artful
men, be provoked to anger against us. I cannot believe they will
be cruel or unjust; or that their anger will be implacable. Let us
behave like dutiful children, who have received unmerited blows
from a beloved parent. Let us complain to our parent; but let our
complaints speak at the same time the language of affliction and
veneration.[247]
With so much conceded, what ground of serious quarrel remained? What
was there to justify an American protest against the parliamentary
program? Nothing less than the vital principle of taxation. In this
matter the ministerial policy overrode the fundamental tenet of
Whiggery. The situation was critical, for if the Tories denied the
validity of the Whiggish principle in dealing with the colonies, they
might deny it at home and the old battle of 1688 must be fought over.
The right of control of the public purse by a chamber in which the
property owners were represented, and which they would dominate, was a
principle too vital to be yielded, and the English Whigs in Parliament,
led by Pitt and Camden, took vigorous issue with the ministerial tax
proposals. To American Whigs the proposed innovation was a calamity. To
suffer control of the American purse to pass out of their hands into
those of a group beyond their reach meant a return to a system of Tory
spoliation; it meant that property and the rule of property in America
were threatened. To the colonial Whig the constitutional representative
chamber could be no other than the assembly of the commonwealth of
which he was a taxpayer. The English Parliament was alien if not
hostile to his interests; and if the right of imposing taxes upon the
colonies were held to lie in this overseas body, the colonials would
find themselves in the identical position of their ancestors of the
days of King Charles. No longer masters of their property, they would
not be a free people.
All this John Dickinson understood perfectly, and as a large property
owner he hastened to the defense of the principle of self-taxation.
He proposed to show that the policy of the ministry, in advancing the
new tax program, was a usurpation of power and a violation of the
constitutional rights of American property owners; and that as such
it should be resisted on constitutional grounds. This is the burden
of the celebrated _Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_. In arguing
their case the American debaters were embarrassed by a long series of
precedents which seemed to prove that Parliament possessed sovereignty
over the colonies; that such sovereignty had in fact been repeatedly
acknowledged; and that a hundred years of fiscal legislation,
unchallenged heretofore, had clearly established the parliamentary
right of taxation. To this difficult point Dickinson directed his
argument. The real point at issue, he contended, lay in the fundamental
distinction between a tax and an imposition; Parliament possessed the
constitutional right to impose the latter, but not the former. An
imposition, he pointed out, is a fiscal arrangement made by the proper
representatives, primarily “for the regulation of trade,” and with a
view to the general interests of the whole; whereas a tax is a “gift
of the people to the crown, to be employed for public uses.” The one
is regulatory in intent, imposed in a paternal spirit; and though the
result may lessen or increase the opportunity of the individual or the
community to acquire property, it does not take away what has already
been got; whereas a tax reaches into the pocket of the individual
and takes from him what belongs to him alone. Unless the subject
“give and grant of his own free will,” such a tax had long been held
unconstitutional. Of necessity, every tax must be internal, and since
by their charter governments the colonies were granted the right to
impose “internal taxes,” Parliament has no right to impose them.
A “+TAX+” means an imposition to raise money. Such persons
therefore as speak of _internal_ and external “+TAXES+,” I pray
may pardon me, if I object to that expression, as applied to the
privileges and interests of these colonies. There may be _internal_
and _external_ +IMPOSITIONS+, founded on _different principles_,
and having _different tendencies_, every “tax” being an imposition,
tho’ every imposition is not a “tax.” But _all taxes_ are founded
on the same _principles_; and have the _same tendency_. External
impositions, for the regulation of our trade, do not “grant to
his Majesty _the property of the colonies_.” They only _prevent
the colonies acquiring property_, in things not necessary, in a
manner judged to be injurious to the welfare of the whole empire.
But the last statute respecting us, “grants to his Majesty _the
property of the colonies_,” by laying duties on the manufactures of
_Great-Britain_ which they +MUST+ take, and which she settled on
them, on purpose that they +SHOULD+ take. What _tax_ can be more
internal than this? Here is money drawn, _without their consent_,
from a society, who have constantly enjoyed a constitutional mode
of raising all money among themselves.[248]
This line of argument was not original with Dickinson. It had earlier
been elaborated by Daniel Dulany of Maryland, in an able pamphlet,[249]
which had provided argument to Pitt for his speech on the repeal of the
Stamp Act.[250] Dickinson in turn quoted from Pitt’s speech in support
of his position.[251] How intimate was the connection between English
and American Whigs, and how like was their reasoning, is made clear
from a passage of a later speech by Pitt which Dickinson quoted in the
preface to a collected edition of his works issued in 1801: