This universal opposition to your arbitrary system of taxation,

might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things,

and from the nature of man, and _above all_ ... from the spirit

of +WHIGGISM+ flourishing in _America_. The spirit which _now_

pervades _America_, is _the same_ which formerly opposed loans,

benevolences, and ship-money in this country; is _the same spirit_

which roused all _England_ to action at the revolution, and which

established at a remote era, your liberties, on the basis of that

grand fundamental maxim of the constitution, that no subject of

_England_ shall be taxed, but by his own consent. To maintain this

principle, is the _common cause_ of the +WHIGS+, on the other

side of the _Atlantic_, and on this. _It is liberty to liberty

engaged._ In this great cause they are immoveably allied. It is

the alliance of _God_ and _nature_, immutable, eternal, fixed as

the firmament of heaven. As an _Englishman_, I recognize to the

_Americans_, their supreme unalterable right of property. As an

_American_, I would equally recognize to _England_, her supreme

right of regulating commerce and navigation. This distinction is

involved in the abstract nature of things; property is private,

individual, absolute: the touch of another annihilates it. Trade

is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far

as ships can sail, or winds can blow; it is a vast and various

machine. To regulate the numberless movements of its several

parts, and combine them into one harmonious effect, for the good

of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the

supreme power of the empire. On this grand practical distinction,

then, let us rest: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is

ours. As to metaphysical refinements, attempting to shew, that

the _Americans_ are equally free from legislative controul, and

commercial restraint, as from taxation, for the purpose of revenue,

I pronounce them futile, frivolous, and groundless.[252]

How characteristic of Pitt is the shrewd purpose, covered over with

pretentious rhetoric, to seize the imperialistic substance of trade

control for the London merchants, and graciously yield in the name of

liberty, the shadow of taxation!

Discussion of abstract rights interested Dickinson no more than it did

Pitt; but he cared greatly for English liberty, by which he meant the

rights of propertied gentlemen recognized by the British constitution,

for which his ancestors had struggled. He had no wish to enlarge

those rights, for he believed they were adequate to the well-being

of Englishmen. No thought of a republican form of government crossed

his mind. He had no sympathy with democracy; he believed in a “mixed

government” as exemplified in the British system; and while he was not

an outspoken advocate of an American peerage, he would have approved of

its institution. Like so many upper-class Americans, he was English as

well as colonial; he could not conceive that the heritage of England

to her sons was circumscribed by geographical lines, and he habitually

thought and spoke in terms of the British Empire, and never in local

terms. What he most feared was a misunderstanding that would widen

into rupture. There is more than a hint of the doctrine of passive

resistance in his counsel of moderation:

The cause of _liberty_ is a cause of too much dignity to be sullied

by turbulence and tumult. It ought to be maintained in a manner

suitable to her nature. Those who engage in it, should breathe a

sedate, yet fervent spirit, animating them to actions of prudence,

justice, modesty, bravery, humanity, and magnanimity.... I hope,

my dear countrymen, that you will, in every colony, be on your

guard against those, who may at any time endeavour to stir you

up, under pretense of patriotism, to any measures disrespectful

to our Sovereign and our mother country. Hot, rash, disorderly

proceedings, injure the reputation of a people, as to wisdom,

valour, and virtue, without procuring them the least benefit. I

pray god, that he may be pleased to inspire you and your posterity,

to the latest ages, with a spirit of which I have an idea, that

I find a difficulty to express. To express it in the best manner

I can, I mean a spirit, that shall so guide you, that it will be

impossible to determine whether an _American’s_ character is most

distinguishable, for its loyalty to his Sovereign, his duty to

his mother country, his love of freedom, or his affection for his

native soil.[253]

In these earlier years of the controversy Dickinson seems to have

remained placidly unaware of the sordid realities of parliamentary

huckstering, the details of which Franklin was daily noting in his

letters. He seems honestly to have believed in the justice and good

intentions of the King and his ministers, and he felt little sympathy

for the New England malcontents. But as the debate dragged on, and the

English politicians in whose rectitude he had professed confidence,

clearly were playing into the hands of British trading interests, going

so far as to seek to bolster up the falling fortunes of the East India

Company at the expense of colonial merchants, he was impelled to speak

with plebeian warmth. His _Two Letters on the Tea Tax_, written in

November, 1773, are as vigorous in denunciation as Samuel Adams could

have penned.

_Five Ships_, loaded with +TEA+, on their Way to _America_, and

this with a View not only to _enforce_ the _Revenue Act_, but to

_establish_ a _Monopoly_ for the _East-India Company_, who have

espoused the Cause of the Ministry; and hope to repair their

broken Fortunes by the Ruin of _American_ freedom and Liberty! No

Wonder the Minds of the People are exasperated ... to a degree of

Madness.... Pray have you heard, whether _they_ and the _Ministers_

have not _made a Property_ of +US+, and whether +WE+, our +WIVES+

and +CHILDREN+, together, with the +HARD EARNED FRUITS OF OUR

LABOUR+, are not _made over_ to this almost _bankrupt Company_,

to augment their Stock, and to _repair_ their _ruined Fortunes?_

Justice seems to have forsaken the old World.... The Rights of

free States and Cities are swallowed up in Power. Subjects are

considered as Property.... Are we ... to be given up to the

Disposal of the _East-India Company?_.... Their conduct in Asia,

for some Years past, has given ample Proof, how little they regard

the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They

have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes,

and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain ... hackneyed as

they are in Murders, Rapine, and Cruelty, [they] would sacrifice

the Lives of Thousands to preserve their Trash, and enforce their

measures.[254]

The ideal of a beneficent British Empire, extending English freedom

through the world, appealed to the imagination of Dickinson; but the

reality of British imperialism, “hackneyed in murders, rapine and

cruelty,” seeking to extend its exploitation to America, striking at

the trade interests of Philadelphia and his merchant friends, was

enough to disturb his legal calm. What fate awaited American rights

and liberties if the London imperialists were permitted to prey upon

them, he began to comprehend. The bones would be picked clean, and

America would become another India. It was the deepening fear of such

a possibility that sapped Dickinson’s loyalty, and reconciled him to

independence after the thing was done.

The later years of Dickinson were happier than those of the middle

period. The conservative reaction that set in with the conclusion of

peace carried the emerging party of nationalism back to the position

of Whiggery, which Dickinson had tenaciously occupied. The leaders of

that party were coming to agree on the necessity for a closer alignment

in defense of property rule, and they gladly accepted Dickinson as

an ally and co-worker. He was chosen a member of the Constitutional

Convention, and there found a congenial audience for the exposition of

his political principles. In the debates he spoke as a high Federalist

who would like to go further toward the model of the British system

than the state of the public mind rendered expedient. A strong and

stable government, he believed, depended upon a just balance of king,

lords, and commons.

A limited monarchy he considered as _one_ of the best governments

in the world. He was not certain that the same blessings were

derivable from any other form. It was certain that equal blessings

had never yet been derived from any of the republican forms. A

limited monarchy, however, was out of the question. The spirit of

the times, the state of our affairs, forbade the experiment, if it

were desirable. Was it possible, moreover, in the nature of things,

to introduce it, even if these objects were less insuperable? A

house of nobles was essential to such a government. Could these

be created by a breath, or by a stroke of the pen? No. They were

the growth of ages, and could only arise under a complication of

circumstances none of which existed in this country. But, though a

form the most perfect, _perhaps_, in itself, be unattainable, we

must not despair.[255]

Granted the necessity of a republican form of government, the question

so vital to Whiggery remained, how could property secure and maintain

a commanding position in the government? The reply was obvious; it

must be through limitation of suffrage rights. If the vote could be

restricted to property holders, even though small freeholders were

included, the common rights of property would be secure.

Mr. Dickinson had a very different idea of the tendency of

vesting the rights of suffrage in the freeholders of the Country.

He considered them as the best guardians of liberty; And the

restriction of the right to them as a necessary defence agst. the

dangerous influence of those multitudes without property & without

principle, with which our country like all others, will in time

abound.[256]

A further safeguard offered in the proper constitution of the Senate.

As a representative of a small state, Dickinson was concerned that the

several states should enjoy a parity of power in the upper house, as he

was concerned that the Senate should provide a safeguard for property

interests. It must be rendered secure from factional unrest and

democratic aggression. He was very likely at one with his friend George

Clymer, in holding that “a representative of the people is appointed

to think _for_ and not _with_ his constituents”; and to the end that

the right persons should be chosen to do the national thinking, he

laid down the principle that, “In the formation of the Senate, we

ought to carry it through such a refining process as will assimilate

it as nearly as may be to the House of Lords in England.”[257]

Such expressions throw sufficient light upon Dickinson’s opinions

of democratic government, but they do not prepare us for a curious

inconsistency that marked his last years, namely, his friendship for

Jefferson and his sympathy with the Jeffersonian program. The reasons

for this strange shift are not clear, but it is generally attributed

to his fear of consolidation that might end in subordinating the small

states to the greater ones. It certainly was not due to any sympathy

with agrarianism.

Dickinson was in no sense a serious political thinker. He was a

cultivated lawyer who defended with skill and grace a ready-made

philosophy, unconcerned about the social significance of that

philosophy. Scarcely anywhere else in his writings does he show to such

poor advantage as in the nine _Letters of Fabius_ written in defense

of the Constitution during the great debate. There is in them not

a single illuminating comment. His most anxious concern is shown in

his reply to George Mason’s direct charge, that the “government will

commence in a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to

foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a

corrupt oppressive aristocracy.”[258] After searching the records of

the past he concludes that “the uniform tenor of history ... holds up

the _licentiousness_ of the people, and _turbulent temper_ of some of

the states, as _the only causes_ to be dreaded, not the conspiracies

of federal officers.”[259] The argument had been somewhat staled by

Federalistic repetition, but Dickinson soberly accepted it as sound

historical interpretation. His cleverest defense he found in an

appeal to the analogy of the British constitution, which has only one

democratic branch, and that “diseased” by inadequate representation, to

withstand the power and influence of king and lords; if English liberty

has been thus safeguarded, what danger can threaten America with “a

constitution and government, every branch of which is so extremely

popular”?[260]

However greatly the writings of Dickinson, from the Farmer’s Letters

to the _Letters of Fabius_, may have appealed to Whiggish lawyers, it

is inconceivable that they should have appealed to the rank and file

of Americans. As an eighteenth-century gentleman he little understood

the spirit of liberalism that was stirring in many minds; he did not

sympathize with the turbulent forces that were driving towards a

different social order; and in consequence his technical arguments

seem today curiously old-fashioned. Franklin’s common sense kept him

a realist; but Dickinson’s loyalty made him an idealist, incapable of

understanding current economic forces either in England or America. The

colonial was so ingrained in his habits of thought that it was hard for

him to become an American. So long as it was politic to profess loyalty

to England while remonstrating against ministerial policies, John

Dickinson was the man for the business. But when it became necessary

to throw aside the mask of loyal professions, to stand up and fight,

he was thrust aside to make room for more vigorous spokesmen. No doubt

there were desirable things which the radicals overlooked; no doubt

the ideal of imperial unity, of a world-wide federation of the several

bodies of Englishmen, possessed a grandeur which ardent patriots held

too cheap. But that ideal did not prevail, despite Dickinson’s earnest

endeavors; and in the new order which arose he probably never felt

quite at home, or was free from a lingering regret. He belonged still

in that older world in which he was bred.

Footnotes

[244] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 257.

[245] “Farmer’s Letters,” in _Works_, Vol. I, p. 312.

[246] _Ibid._, p. 337.

[247] _Ibid._, p. 327.

[248] _Ibid._, pp. 332-333.

[249] _Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British

Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue by Act of Parliament._

[250] See Tyler, _Literary History of the American Revolution_, Vol. I,

p. 111.

[251] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 320.

[252] _Ibid._, pp. xv-xvii.

[253] “Farmer’s Letters,” in _Works_, Vol. I, pp. 324-325.

[254] _Works_, Vol. I, pp. 459-461.

[255] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. V, p. 148.

[256] _Ibid._

[257] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 163.

[258] Quoted in Ford, _Pamphlets on the Constitution_, p. 332.

[259] _Ibid._, p. 200.

[260] _Ibid._, p. 212.

Chapter IV • Samuel Adams • The Mind of the American Democrat

In the history of the rise of political democracy in America Samuel

Adams occupies a distinguished place. He was by no means the first

American to espouse the democratic cause, but he was the first to

conceive the party machinery to establish it in practice. The single

purpose of his life was the organization of the rank and file to

take over control of the political state. He was the instrument of a

changing world that was to transfer sovereignty from the aristocratic

minority to the democratic majority. Political sovereignty inheres

potentially in the mass will of the people; but if that will is

restrained from exercising its strength by an undemocratic psychology,

it remains powerless in presence of an organized minority. The America

in which Samuel Adams labored was ripe to throw off the inhibitions

of the popular will; and it was his perception of that fact, and the

tenacity and skill with which he cajoled the mass to “make a push for

perfect political liberty,” that made him an outstanding figure in our

history. In his hands the majority will became in reality the sovereign

will. But before he could wield it he must create it; and before he

could create it he must understand the mass mind. He must turn popular

prejudice to his own purpose; he must guide the popular resentment at

grievances into the way of revolution; he must urge the slow moving

mass forward until it stood on the threshold of independence, beyond

which lay the ultimate goal of his ambitions, the democratic state.

And so, in pursuit of his life purpose, Samuel Adams became a master

political strategist, the first of our great popular leaders.

The modern term, professional agitator, most adequately characterizes

him. He was an intriguing rebel against every ambition of the regnant

order. He hated every sort of aristocratic privilege, whether in

the form of overseas prerogative or in the later guise of native

Federalism; it must be swept away and a new, democratic order take its

place. In the pursuit of this great end he daily counseled treason

and made rebellion his business. Loyalty to the government _de facto_

was no virtue in his political ethics; he was not frightened into

conformity by the stigma attaching to the term rebel. America was

founded in rebellion, he well knew, and it should continue in rebellion

till every false loyalty was cast off and concern for the common

well-being accepted as the single loyalty worthy of respect. “What has

commonly been called rebellion in the people,” he commented wisely,

“has often been nothing else but a manly and glorious struggle in

opposition to the lawless power of rebellious Kings and Princes.”[261]

He was the outstanding example in his day of the militant idealist to

whom the dissemination of unrest was a matter of principle. No cause

goes forward without its leaders, and democratic America owes Samuel

Adams a debt which it has too grudgingly acknowledged.

He was born and grew up in an atmosphere of politics. His father

was a prosperous, well-read gentleman who found politics a pleasant

avocation; he established the Caucus Club for political discussion,

and became one of the leaders of the popular party that opposed the

Tory group, gathered about the royal officials. Its personnel can only

be guessed at, but it was probably composed of small merchants, with

a following of mechanics and other unimportant folk. It seems to have

been greatly interested in currency reform, and the elder Adams was

one of the principal organizers and stockholders of the Land Bank, a

project for increasing the money of the commonwealth. The institution

was roughly liquidated by government decree at the instigation of

commercial rivals interested in “tight money”; the father lost heavily

and the son was pretty much ruined by later attempts at arbitrary

collection on his stock. It seems to have been a petty and altogether

sordid move on the part of government, in which Hutchinson played an

important part. With the loss of his money Samuel Adams, Jr., settled

down to a meager, somewhat precarious existence, preferring politics

to profits, and began that long, arduous career which resulted so

momentously for America.

He had taken his two degrees at Harvard in the expectation of becoming

a minister; but while an undergraduate he was more interested in the

political classics than in theology, and he rejected the ministry for

the law. But a brief experience with Coke sufficed, and he turned

to more congenial fields. With a group of like-minded young men he

founded in 1748 _The Public Advertiser_, a weekly magazine of politics.

In the essays which as a young man of twenty-six he wrote for that

paper, he expounded a political creed frankly liberal. He began as he

ended, anti-Tory and pro-democratic. From then till the beginning of

the tax troubles he was a tireless contributor to the newspapers, and

except during the administration of the liberal Pownall, always in

the opposition. Hutchinson stated the exact truth when he said, “He

was for near twenty years a writer against government in the public

newspapers.” The need was urgent, for during those years the government

of Massachusetts was being subtly changed. With increasing prosperity,

ways of thinking, like styles of dress, were becoming more like those

of St. James’s. Ambitious young men were drawn into the circle of the

ruling group and caught with the bait of preferment. An aristocracy

was emerging that wanted only titles to make ready to set up a House

of Lords. Quite plainly it was time for the liberals to arouse the

rank and file of the people to the danger, and this became the daily

business of Samuel Adams.

The evidence available is insufficient to explain the motives which

impelled him to take up and carry forward so difficult and thankless

a work. The cost in personal ease and the good opinion of respectable

people was great, the peril certain, and the reward dubious.

Not lightly will a serious man compromise with treason; to talk

republicanism was not profitable in Tory New England; and Samuel Adams,

no more than another, was anxious to come to close acquaintance with

the hangman. What secret motives inspired the heart of this ascetic

Puritan--“he eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much,”

said the Loyalist Galloway, half sneeringly, half out of respect--we

can only guess at. Very likely there was an old grudge at a government

that had ruined him; very likely love of power stimulated his hatred

of the ruling clique; very likely his close association with tradesmen

colored his resentment at overseas regulation, for better than most,

he knew that the American goose was reserved for English plucking.

Nevertheless the more intimately one comes to know Samuel Adams the

more inadequate seem all cynical and sordid interpretations of his

strange career. He was no self-seeking politician, but a man of vision.

He believed ardently in the principle of local home rule. Love of

the New England town-meeting democracy was bred in his bones. More

clearly than others he saw the danger of erecting a governing class

irresponsive to the popular will. He was, in short, the embodiment

of the rising spirit of the eighteenth century that found expression

in individualism, that exalted liberty and hated tyranny--a spirit

that had for its ultimate purpose the reduction of the powers of the

political state.

His critical study of the methods of Tory politicians early stripped

from government the last vestige of glamor so appealing to the

ignorant. Adams understood too perfectly the secret springs and

backstairs intrigues that determined governmental policies, to be taken

in by appeal to his loyalty. English politics was a sordid business,

conducted by professional traders, to whom loyalty and patriotism were

no more than gestures to gull the simple. Quite as well as Franklin,

Adams understood its ways. He had watched the steady unfolding of the

ministerial program: how it was proposed to free the royal governor

and judges from popular restraint by the payment of salaries from the

royal chest; to change the charter in the interest of prerogative by

vesting the nomination of the councilors in the governor; to disarm the

democracy by destroying the town meeting as a political instrument;

in short to substitute government by ministerial instructions for

government by the people. As he watched the calculated encroachments

upon the historical rights of the commonwealth--rights that were

sanctioned by a hundred and forty years of exercise, and were now in

danger from carelessness--he would have been faithless to his duty

if he had not sought to arouse the people of Massachusetts to the

danger. There was no idle rhetoric in the words, “No time can better

be employed than in the preservation of the rights derived from the

British constitution.... No treasure can be better expended, than in

securing that true old English liberty, which gives a relish to every

other enjoyment.”[262]

In the fulfillment of this purpose to defend the democratic rights of

Massachusetts, Adams became no mean master of political theory. In the

works of no other writer is the total body of Revolutionary thought so

adequately revealed. He was deeply read in the political classics, and

all the great names--Hooker and Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, Coke and

Blackstone, Locke and Milton and Sidney and Hume and Montesquieu--are

spread largely through his pages to buttress his argument. In spite

of the elusive “meanders and windings” of his thought, veering and

tacking as the winds blew, three broad lines of defense are clearly

discernible. He rested his case on an appeal to the natural rights of

man, to the particular rights and privileges of the British subject

under the constitution, and to the express terms of the compact between

the crown and its emigrant subjects laid down in the several colonial

charters. Inasmuch as the American cause was to be argued before an

old-world court, it was common prudence to seek to justify the seeming

innovations of American institutional development, by old-world

precedent and authority. If he could base the American grievance on

the Whig doctrine of representation, he might rally the English Whigs

to the American cause. This was sound constitutionalism, and Adams was

too shrewd not to profess the highest respect for the glorious British

constitution. “You know there is a charm in the word ‘constitutional,’”

he slyly suggested to a fellow colonial; and such respect, not to say

veneration, he trumpeted to the world, until it may well have seemed

that he did protest too much.

In his first line of defense Adams was on familiar ground, and he

was supported by the authority of Locke, whose opinions were sacred

in the eyes of English Whigs. What use he made of him is evident;

“the immortal Locke,” he calls him at one time, and at another, “one

of the greatest men that ever wrote.” He had been a disciple of

Locke since his first interest in political theory, and he thought

and spoke habitually in terms of the natural-rights school. It is

sometimes asserted that the appeal to natural rights was made only

after the breakdown of the colonial argument drawn from constitutional

practice.[263] But as early as 1765 Adams based his argument on Locke

in assuming the economic origin of government, and the inevitable

connection between property and parliamentary representation.[264]

How heavily he leaned on the natural-rights school appears again

and again; particularly in a brilliant series of articles, signed

“Candidus,” written in 1771, where he paraphrases the _Second Treatise

on Government_:

Mr. Locke has often been quoted in the present dispute ... and very

much to our purpose. His reasoning is so forcible, that no one has

ever attempted to confute it. He holds that “the preservation of

property is the end of government, and that for which men enter

into society. It therefore necessarily supposes and requires

that the people should have property, without which they must be

suppos’d to lose that by entering into society, which was the _end_

for which they enter’d into it; too gross an absurdity for any man

to own. Men therefore _in society having property_, they have such

right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs,

that no body hath the right to take _any part_ of their subsistence

from them without their consent: Without this, they could have no

property at all. For I truly can have no property in that which

another can by right take from me when he pleases, against my

consent. Hence, says he, it is a mistake to think that the supreme

power of any commonwealth can dispose of the estates of the subject

arbitrarily, or _take any part_ of them at pleasure. The prince or

senate can never have a power to take to themselves the whole or

any part of the subjects’ property without _their own_ consent;

for this would be in effect to have no property at all.”--This is

the reasoning of that great and good man. And is not our own case

exactly described by him?[265]

This was excellent doctrine in the eyes of the English Whigs, and

it explains in part the support which Pitt and Camden lent to the

colonial cause. But in his second line of defense, namely, that the

English constitution was a fundamental charter of the natural rights

of the subject, and that a statute which disregarded those natural

rights was null and void, Adams was on less tenable ground. Every

attempt to establish such a principle, whether that fundamental law

be conceived of as the “law of God and nature,” special compacts like

the Magna Charta, or the Common Law, has met with failure in English

constitutional practice. Nevertheless Adams made use of the argument,

derived, very likely, from Coke.

Magna Charta itself is in substance but a constrained Declaration

or proclamation, and promulgation in the name of King, Lords, and

Commons, of the sense the latter had of their original, inherent,

indefeazible natural Rights, as also those of free Citizens equally

perdurable with the other. That great author, that great jurist,

and even that Court writer Mr. Justice Blackstone holds that this

recognition was justly obtained of King John sword in hand: and

peradventure it must be one day sword in hand again rescued and

preserved from total destruction.[266]

[Magna Charta] is affirm’d by Lord Coke to be declaratory of

the principal grounds of the fundamental laws and liberties of

England. “It is called _Charta Libertatum Regni, the Charter

of the Liberties of the kingdom_, upon great reason ... because

_liberos facit, it makes and preserves the people free_.”... If

then according to Lord Coke, _Magna Charta_ is declaratory of

the principal grounds of the _fundamental_ laws and liberties of

the people, and Vatel is right in his opinion, that the supreme

legislature cannot change the constitution, I think it follows,

whether Lord Coke has expressly asserted it or not, that an act of

parliament made against Magna Charta in violation of its essential

parts, is void.[267]

Adams was probably fully aware of the weakness of the argument. The

well known attempt of Coke to establish a body of super-parliamentary

law that sanctioned the annulling of a statute had been a total

failure. Parliament had refused to yield sovereignty to the lawyers.

The Tories were on stronger ground in asserting Hume’s doctrine that

“the only rule of government is the established practice of the age,

upon maxims universally assented to”; and the established practice

was sufficient reply to the argument that “it is the glory of the

British constitution that it hath its foundations in the law of God and

nature.” Moreover the doctrine of virtual representation was at hand

to cover any discrepancy between natural rights and existing practice;

the argument from Locke was met by a legal refinement which held that

as the charter of Massachusetts was as of the manor of East Greenwich,

the freemen of Boston were personally represented by the parliamentary

member from that borough.

When Adams fell back upon his third line of defense, the appeal to

the colonial charter, he broke with the English Whigs completely. The

royal charters, by authority of which the colonies had been founded and

governed hitherto, were exalted by him into a secondary fundamental

law, subordinate to the English constitution, but with authority

beyond an act of parliament. This organic law of the charter was “the

only medium of their political connection with the Mother State,” he

argued, and as sacred to Americans “as Magna Charta is to the People of

Britain, as it contains a Declaration of all their Rights founded in

natural Justice.”[268]

Thus we see that Whatever Govermnt in general may be founded in,

Ours was manifestly founded in Compact.... By this Charter, we have

an exclusive Right to make Laws for our own internal Government &

Taxation: And indeed if the Inhabitants here are British Subjects

... it seems necessary that they should exercise this Power

themselves; for they are not represented in the British Parliamt &

their great Distance renders it impracticable: It is very probable

that all the subordinate legislative Powers in America, were

constituted upon the Apprehension of this Impracticability.[269]

After all, the futility of argument as a colonial defense against

Grenville or Townshend was evident to so shrewd a student of political

realism as Samuel Adams. If the colonies were to preserve their

traditional liberties, more effective means must be found than appeal

to justice or colonial use and wont. Force must be used, and that

force--short of armed rebellion--could be only an aroused public

opinion. It was like to prove a difficult business, this arousing of

an effective public opinion, and not wanting in danger; but neither

difficulty nor danger would deter a calculating enthusiast like Adams

from undertaking it. He was ready to devote his life to the work of

creating and guiding a popular interest in political measures.

The means which he made use of were as novel as they were repugnant

to the Tory statecraft. He was the first American to understand the

power of publicity, and not the least of his services to democracy was

his attack upon the principle of secret government. Affairs of state

had always been guarded jealously from public knowledge, on the theory

long before stated by Sir Robert Filmer that the subject must “have

nothing to do to meddle with mysteries of state, such _arcana imperii_,

or cabinet councils, the vulgar may not pry into.” Adams now proposed

to lay them open to common inspection. He insisted that questions of

governmental policy be taken out of the exclusive jurisdiction of

secret councils, and transferred to Faneuil Hall where the freemen

of Boston might examine them, and where the “Cause of Liberty” might

“be warmly espoused and ably vindicated.” Here was a revolutionary

proposal indeed, with its demand for public discussion and a popular

referendum; and naturally it gave offense to the crown officials. It

meant the vulgarization of government. It was a disturbing thought

to such men that government might come to be regarded as the common

concern of the tax-paying public; that the town meeting might fall

under the control of the plebeian mass and crowd in with its demands

upon the aristocratic Council. How could gentlemen deliberate freely

and determine wisely, with demagogues sitting in judgment on every word

and vote? So disturbing to gentlemen was any criticism that one of

Hutchinson’s followers went so far as to charge Adams with “Indecency

in ‘undertaking to answer a Governor’s Message,’” to which he replied:

I know very well that it has been handed as a political Creed of

late, that the Reasoning of the People without Doors is not to be

regarded--But every “transient Person” has a Right publickly to

animadvert upon whatever is publickly advanc’d by any Man, and I am

resolv’d to exercise that Right, when I please, without asking any

Man’s Leave.[270]

Effective organization of the rank and file of the people was the

business at hand. It was a new problem and there was need of new

methods. The Caucus Club, founded by his father, served as a training

school for the leaders; there the policies were determined upon for the

town meeting and the assembly, and there the plans for a continental

union were laid in Non-Importation Agreements, organization of

Committees of Correspondence, and the like. The program there agreed

upon Adams made it his business to put through the town meeting, as

the first step. When he faced his fellow Bostonians in Faneuil Hall

he relied upon the influence which long years of familiar intercourse

with all sorts and conditions of men had won for him, and many a Boston

freeman went to the meeting ready to vote for “whatever the old man

wanted.” Behind the imposing figure of John Hancock, or the eloquence

of John Adams, was certain to be the directing mind of the “master of

the puppets,” as Hutchinson sneeringly called Samuel Adams.

His hours of triumph in Boston town meeting or in the assembly were

preceded by an incredible amount of labor with the pen as well as with

the tongue, for this master politician was the journalist as well as

the organizer of the New England revolution. The public opinion on

which he depended was daily being made in chimney corners and tavern

talk, and he proposed to mold it through the agency of a party press.

No other pen in Boston was so busy as his. “There is Sam Adams writing

against the Tories,” his fellow townsmen are said to have remarked

when they saw his familiar candle burning long into the night. When he

was away in attendance on the Continental Congress he reproached his

friends at home for neglecting the work of publicity. “Your presses

have been too long silent. What were your Committees of Correspondence

about? I hear nothing of circular Letters--of joynt Committees &c.

Such Methods have in times past raised the Spirits of the people--drawn

off their Attention from picking up Pins, & directed their Views to

great objects.”[271]

With such neglect Samuel Adams could not be charged. As clerk of the

inevitable Committee of Grievances appointed by the Boston town meeting

in accordance with his prearranged plan, he wrote those plain-spoken

papers that stirred the wrath of Tory gentlemen; as clerk of the

assembly he was the chief author of successive state papers, which

under guise of replying to the prerogative principles of Bernard

and Hutchinson, set forth in masterly fashion the whole theory of

colonial rights; and as Chairman of the Committee of Correspondence

he appealed to his fellow Americans of every colony. Yet his official

writings constitute only a minor part of his total work. His letters

were innumerable and his newspaper articles crowded the desk of every

friendly editor. The labors undergone and the energy consumed were

enormous. It was no holiday task to create and guide a public opinion

that was so constantly falling into apathy.

Running through the third volume of Hutchinson’s _History of

Massachusetts Bay_ is a note of indignant protest at “the machinations

of selfish and designing men” who at the precise time when the feeling

between the two countries was friendliest, and an amicable settlement

of differences seemed likeliest, were assiduous to breed fresh discord

and frustrate the hopes of peace. That he had Adams chiefly in mind

there can be little doubt. During the “calm interval” of the summer

of ’71, when, according to Hutchinson, “the province was more free

from real evils” than for years, and when “to keep up a spirit of

discontent, recourse was had, either to evils merely imaginary, or to

such as were at a distance, and feared rather than felt,”[272] Adams

wrote the ablest of his many able newspaper articles.[273] In no other

phase of his work is the craft of the man so evident as in these

anonymous newspaper discussions. There was cunning as well as caution

in his method. Changing his style with every fresh quill and every

new pen name, putting forth an idea for the sake of denying it, then

examining its merits cautiously, and finally advocating it boldly, he

created like Falstaff a host of patriots out of a single Bostonian in

brown homespun, making it appear that many were troubled over evils

that were visible only to him. On occasion his style possesses the

light touch, the leisurely detail, the easy pleasantry of a Spectator

essay;[274] again, there is a note of biting irony and studied

insult;[275] and again, there is dignified discussion in which Adams

argues dispassionately with his countrymen, or pleads with them to

stand together in defense of the common welfare. But in whatever vein

or under whatever disguise he wrote, the conclusion of every argument

was the implied suggestion, how much better it would be if the American

people were to take into their own hands the management of their

affairs.

But before the colonial could be induced to strike for governmental

control, the old psychology of subserviency to the ruling class must

be uprooted; and an effective means to that end was to lay bare the

selfish motives of the aristocracy. To stimulate what we call today

class consciousness was a necessary preliminary to a democratic

psychology; and to this task Adams devoted every energy. The ways

of the iconoclast are rarely lovely, and the breaking of idols is

certain to wound sensitive souls. There was abundant justification

for the charge of Hutchinson that “robbing men of their characters”

was the “patriotic business” of Samuel Adams; but he missed the point

in attributing to him the motive, _Gubernatorum vituperatio populo

placet_. The respect that attached to Bernard and Hutchinson by

virtue of their official positions was a powerful ally of ministerial

authority; their words carried weight beyond the sanction of their

logic; for the good of America their power must be destroyed. Doubtless

Adams was ungenerous in attack; certainly he was vindictive in his

hates; but the cold record as we read it today justifies one in the

belief that the men whom he attacked were tools of the ministry,

and must be struck down if the rights of Massachusetts were to be

preserved. And it was due to the bitter denunciations of Adams that

Thomas Hutchinson was driven from his native land and forced to take

refuge in England, the best hated man in all the colonies.

But it was not enough to pull down the courtly Hutchinson, for behind

the governor was a group of lawyers and judges, equally subservient

to prerogative, adepts in the art of interpreting away rights by due

process of law. It became part of the day’s work, therefore, to lay

open the sacred precincts of the courts to common inspection; to create

a public opinion to review judicial decisions when those decisions

were political rather than legal. It was a startling innovation for a

private citizen to assert in the public press that “_state-lawyers_,

attorneys and sollicitors general, & persons advanced to the highest

stations in the courts of law, _prostitute_ the honor of the

profession, become _tools of ministers_, and employ their talents for

_explaining away_, if possible, the Rights of a kingdom.” Never before

had the integrity of the colonial courts been openly attacked and

the motives of the judiciary impugned. But it was far more startling

for Adams to lay down the thesis, that in matters which concern the

general welfare, the letter of the law is not to be considered final,

and “the opinions ... and determinations of the greatest Sages and

Judges of the law in the Exchequer Chamber, ought not to be considered

as decisive or binding ... any further, than they are consonant to

natural reason.”[276] If Franklin was concerned to create a new

economics in harmony with democratic needs, Samuel Adams was concerned

to democratize the New England law. He was dissatisfied with a legal

system created by a Tory past, and that had lately received a fresh

Tory impress at the hands of Blackstone. Such a body of law could not

answer the needs of a free people; it must be reshaped to conform to

new needs. And the conclusion towards which his thinking pointed was

the principle of a referendum of judicial decisions, for how otherwise

could it be determined whether a given decision were “consonant to

natural reason”?

Samuel Adams was little given to striking at the air, and he set

himself to the work of cutting the claws of the more obnoxious judges

with the same cool skill that marked his baiting of the governor.

Certain of them who held plural offices he maneuvered out of the

Council, on the ground that they ought not to exercise both legislative

and judicial functions; and when Bernard protested that they had been

members of the Council for years and by reason of “their knowledge of

the public business, were almost necessary to the body,” he replied

that they were to be released “from the cares and perplexities

of politics ... to make further advances in the knowledge of the

law”--which thrust, in view of the notorious fact that few of them had

been trained in the law, but had risen to the bench through political

influence, must be reckoned a palpable hit.[277] Others beyond his

immediate reach found their characters assailed and their motives

aspersed, until popular respect for them was destroyed; and the unlucky

judges who accepted payment from the royal chest found such a hue and

cry raised against them that they were driven to make choice between

the royal guineas or answering to the mob--a rude but effective way of

stimulating their loyalty to the commonwealth. In short, this “master

of the puppets,” measuring the power of the judges and fearing their

prerogative bias, did not scruple over ways and means of rendering them

more responsive to the popular will, which in the eyes of the best

people of Boston was no less than incendiary.

The work of Samuel Adams was largely done before the word democrat was

given vogue by the French Revolution, and he cautiously refrained from

using it; nevertheless he was probably the most thoroughgoing democrat

of his generation of Americans. He was wholly persuaded that the

sovereign people have a right to change their fundamental law, together

with the interpretation and administration of it, whenever they

desire; and that pending such change it was well to nullify an act of

prerogative subversive of their interests. “We contend, that the People

& their Representatives have a Right to withstand the abusive Exercise

of a legal & constitutional Prerogative of the Crown,” he argued in

reply to Hutchinson; “whenever instructions cannot be complyed with,

without injuring the people, they cease to be binding.”[278] From the

necessary corollary, that the people are competent to judge of their

own good and manage their own affairs, Adams did not shrink. Stated

thus in general terms, the theory possessed no novelty. The sovereignty

of the people had long been a staple of Whiggish theory; but Adams gave

to the doctrine democratic significance. The people, in his philosophy,

were something more than the wealthy and cultured minority to whom the

Whigs appealed; they were the mass of men--the yeoman, the tradesman,

the mechanic--all that multitude of homespun folk who had hitherto been

mere pawns in the political game. Such a passage as this, written four

years before Lexington, reads like Tom Paine and his doctrine of the

_res publica_:

The _multitude_ I am speaking of, is the _body of the people_--no

contemptible multitude--for whose sake government is instituted;

or rather, who have themselves erected it, solely for their own

good--to whom even kings and all in subordination to them, are

strictly speaking, servants and not masters.... Philanthrop

[Jonathan Sewall] I think, speaks somewhat unintelligently, when

he tells us that the well being and happiness of the whole depends

upon _subordination_; as if mankind submitted to government for the

sake of being subordinate.... Mankind have entered into political

societies, rather for the sake of restoring _equality_.... I am not

of levelling principles: But I am apt to think, that constitution

of civil government which admits equality in the most extensive

degree, consistent with the true design of government, is the

best.[279]

Accepting the sovereignty of the people, Adams was led to a pure

democracy, based on the town meeting. He rejected every form of “mixt

government,” whether in the form of king, lords and commons, or in

the form of constitutional checks and balances. That sober men should

profess to prefer the dominion of the few to the rule of all, he could

not understand. “I find everywhere some Men, who are afraid of a free

Government,” he said in 1776, “lest it be perverted, and made Use of

as a Cloke for Licenciousness. The fear of the Peoples abusing their

Liberty is made an Argument against their having the Enjoyment of it;

as if anything were so much to be dreaded by Mankind as Slavery.”[280]

Democracy he believed was inevitable, for “in these times of Light

and Liberty, every man chuses to see and judge for himself.”[281]

He was quite untroubled by any fear of the tyranny of the mass; he

was a good enough historian to know that it is always the minority

and not the mass that creates tyranny. Though Toryism might infect

the government circles, and aristocracy appeal to the wealthy and

ambitious, the great body of Massachusetts people were democratic, and

he looked forward hopefully to a new political order, created by the

popular mind. It came more quickly than he had expected, once the old

inhibitions were removed. “New Govts are now erecting in the several

American states under the Authority of the People,” he wrote soon after

Independence. “Monarchy seems to be generally exploded. And it is not

a little surprising to me that the Aristocratick Spirit, which appeard

to have taken deep Root in some of them, now gives place to that of

Democracy.”[282]

During the difficult after-years of reconstruction Adams remained

true to his democratic principles. As he had earlier resisted the

encroachments of monarchical centralization, he later fought against

Federalistic consolidation. He distrusted the Constitution as an

undemocratic instrument, fearing a centralized authority removed from

immediate control; and he joined heartily in the work of securing a

Bill of Rights. He welcomed the French Revolution and followed closely

the developing democratic philosophy which that great upheaval did so

much to clarify and disseminate. He remained an unrepentant Jacobin

during those acrimonious years when the Federalists were filling the

air with their anti-Jacobin fustian. He had heard gentlemen rant

before and was probably amused when, as Governor, he attended Harvard

Commencement and listened to young Robert Treat Paine fulminate against

the red atheism of France and its American spawn. Although a kinsman of

John Adams and warm friend, he welcomed the election of Jefferson as a

return to democratic principles after an unhappy period of “prejudice

and passion,” although he warned him, “you must depend upon being

hated ... because they hate your principles.” The last letter in the

collected edition of his works, addressed to his old friend Tom Paine,

November 30, 1802, is an appeal for democratic unity; and the words

with which it concludes--_felix qui cautus_--embody the principle of

his amazing political strategy. In playing for great stakes it is well

to be wary.

His anti-Federalism, aggravated by his frank advocacy of Jacobin

principles, cost him heavily in after days, and like Philip Freneau his

just fame was long obscured by partisan spleen. Although he retained

his hold on the affections of the Massachusetts electorate, and was

annually chosen Governor until the infirmities of age determined his

withdrawal from public affairs, he was silently dropped from the roll

of American patriots whose deeds were celebrated in current panegyrics.

His manuscripts were scattered after his death, and he was in the way

of being forgotten till Bancroft, in the next century, gave fresh

currency to his earlier reputation. Since then the figure of Samuel

Adams has grown steadily larger, although he still awaits a biographer

who will set him in his due place in the history of American liberalism.

Footnotes

[261] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 269.

[262] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 348.

[263] Hutchinson seems to justify such a view from a passage written in

1770: “The leaders here seem to acknowledge that their cause is not to

be defended on constitutional principles, and Adams now gives out that

there is no need of it; they are upon better ground; all men have a

natural right to change a bad constitution for a better, whenever they

have it in their power.” (Hosmer, _Life of Samuel Adams_, p. 259.)

[264] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 135.

[265] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 299.

[266] “The Rights of the Colonists,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 355-356.

[267] “Candidus,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 325-326.

[268] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 28.

[269] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 29.

[270] “A Chatterer,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 45-46.

[271] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 289.

[272] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 349.

[273] See in particular the “Candidus” articles in _Works_, Vol. II, in

which he elaborated his views on government by ministerial instructions.

[274] See “Puritan” articles, in _Works_, Vol. I, p. 201 _et seq._

[275] See “Candidus,” in Vol. II, p. 246; “Chatterer,” in Vol. II, pp.

35, 39, 43; “Layman,” in Vol. I, p. 322.

[276] _Works_, Vol. II., p. 436.

[277] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 80.

[278] _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 22, 26.

[279] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 150.

[280] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 244.

[281] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 39.

[282] _Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 305.

Chapter V • Literary Echoes

The Revolutionary upheaval produced no polite literature in any

respects comparable to its utilitarian prose. The expiring wit

literature of England was an exotic that refused to be naturalized, and

the times were unpropitious for the creation of a native poetry. An

occasional dilettante like Mather Byles aspired to be a wit, but the

reputation of the clever Bostonian owed more to his tongue than to his

pen, and he is dimly remembered for the letter that he received from

the great Mr. Pope, rather than for notable verse. Nevertheless in the

early seventies pure literature was beginning to make a perceptible

stir in New England. Clever young men in the colleges were turning

moderns and making ready to wage a new battle of the books. They

preferred the refinements of verse to the didacticism of sermons; they

were discovering the charm of playful satire; and they found in the

currently fashionable tetrameter a brisk vehicle for their attacks on

academic dullness. They admired Churchill, then at the height of his

brief fame, but they were restrained by a decent modesty and dared

not go his length in brutal frankness. It was from these young men,

amateurs in verse writing and amateurs likewise in politics, that the

American cause mainly recruited its literary defenders. They might be

flaming Whigs but they were also well-bred young gentlemen who studied

the amenities and sought to unite patriotism with good form.

I • The Whig Satirists

1. John Trumbull

There was the best of Yankee blood in the veins of John Trumbull.

Among his kinsmen were the Reverend Benjamin Trumbull, historian

of Connecticut, Governor Jonathan Trumbull--Washington’s “Brother

Jonathan”--and John Trumbull the painter. On his mother’s side he was

descended from the vigorous Solomon Stoddard, grandfather of Jonathan

Edwards. His father was a scholarly minister, long a trustee of Yale

College, at which school the son spent seven years as undergraduate and

tutor. He was a precocious youth with a strong love of polite letters,

and a praiseworthy desire to achieve literary distinction. Greek and

Latin had been the toys of his childhood and when he was seven years of

age he passed the entrance examination to college. During the period

of his tutorship he joined with Timothy Dwight and Joseph Howe in

the work of overhauling the stale curriculum, supplementing Lilly’s

Grammar and Calvin’s Institutes with Pope and Churchill. Like other

aspiring youths of the day he dabbled in Spectator papers, practiced

his couplets, and eventually produced _The Progress of Dulness_, the

cleverest bit of academic verse till then produced in America. At heart

Trumbull was thoroughly academic, and nothing would have suited his

temperament better than the life of a Yale professor; but the prospects

proving unfavorable, he began to mingle Blackstone with the poets in

preparation for his future profession.

He was thus engaged during the middle years of the long dispute with

England, the bitter wranglings of which seem to have disturbed him

little in his quiet retreat. But in 1773 he resigned his tutorship

to prepare himself further in the law. Removing to Boston he entered

the office of John Adams, then rising to prominence as a spokesman

of the popular party; and he took lodgings in the house of Caleb

Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Placed thus at the

storm center of provincial politics, he was soon infected with the

Whig dissatisfactions and joined himself to the patriotic party. When

Adams went to Philadelphia to sit in the Continental Congress, Trumbull

withdrew to Hartford, where he established himself. Before quitting

Boston he had published an _Elegy on the Times_, a political tract that

seemed to Adams so useful to the cause that he marked the young poet

for future service, and the year following he encouraged the writing

of _M’Fingal_, the first part of which appeared in 1775. So great was

the prestige it met with that Trumbull tinkered with it for seven

years, publishing it finally in its completed form in 1782. The law

seems to have been a jealous mistress then as now, and his dreams of

further literary work were inadequately realized. He is believed to

have had a hand in _The Anarchiad_, and he wrote some minor poems; but

he soon drifted into politics, went on the bench, finally removed to

Detroit in 1825, and died there in 1831, at the age of eighty-one. He

had outlived his Revolutionary generation, long outlived his literary

ambitions, and was pretty much forgotten before he died. His collected

works, published in 1820, proved a losing venture for the printer.

America in 1820 was turning romantic, and few, it seems, cared to

invest in two volumes of echoes.

Trumbull’s reputation rests exclusively on _M’Fingal_. It was so

popular in its time that more than thirty pirated editions were

issued. It was broadcasted by “news-papers, hawkers, pedlars, and

petty chapmen,” and it served its partisan purpose. The author was

complimented by the Marquis de Chastellux on fulfilling all the

conditions of burlesque poetry as approved since the days of Homer;

but in spite of the indisputable cleverness of some of the lines,

it is not a great work. In its final form it is spun out to extreme

length, and pretty much swamped by the elaborate machinery on which the

poet visibly prided himself. Even in the thick of attack Trumbull did

not forget his academic reading, but he explains his allusions with

meticulous care. He seems, indeed, rather more concerned about the laws

of the mock epic than the threatened rights of America. The Scotch Tory

hero is a figure so unlike the real Tory--the Olivers and Leonards and

Hutchinsons, with their love of power and dignified display--that the

caricature loses much in historical veracity. Trumbull’s patriotism

was well bred and unmarked by fierce partisanship. His refined tastes

were an ill equipment for the turmoil of revolution. The ways of the

radical were not lovely in his eyes; the Sons of Liberty with their

tar-pots and feather-beds were too often rough fellows, and although

they provided him with comic material to set off the blunderings of

the Squire, they probably seemed to him little better than tools of

demagogues. Very often this tousle-headed democracy behaved like a mob,

and Trumbull in his tie-wig did not approve of mobs.

The more thoughtfully one reads _M’Fingal_, throwing upon it the light

of the total career of its author, the more clearly one perceives

that John Trumbull was not a rebellious soul. In the year 1773, while

projecting some fresh ventures in the Spectator vein, “he congratulated

himself on the fact ‘that the ferment of politics’ was, as he supposed,

‘pretty much subsided,’ and that at last the country was to enjoy a

‘mild interval from the struggles of patriotism and self-interest,

from noise and confusion, Wilkes and liberty.’” He had then no wish for

embroilment in civil war, no dreams of political independence. All his

life he seems to have suffered from ill health, which probably sapped

his militancy and lessened his pugnacity. From this temperamental

calmness came a certain detachment that allowed his partisanship to

remain cooler than the hot passions of the times commonly suffered. He

could permit himself the luxury of a laugh at the current absurdities;

and it is this light-heartedness that made _M’Fingal_ so immediately

effective. The rollicking burlesque of the Tory argument, the telling

_reductio ad absurdum_ of the Tory logic, must have tickled the ears of

every Whig and provoked many a laugh in obscure chimney-seats. Laughter

is a keen weapon, and Trumbull’s gayety laid open weak spots in the

Tory armor that were proof against Freneau’s invective. It was a rare

note in those acrimonious times, and one likes Trumbull the better for

minding his manners and engaging in the duel like a gentleman. After

all, this son of Yale had certain characteristics of the intellectual,

and if his environment had been favorable and the law had not claimed

him, very likely he would have given a better account of the talents

that were certainly his. He wrote with ease if not with finish, and he

possessed the requisite qualities of a man of letters. A lovable man he

seems to have been, but somewhat easy-going, too lightly turned away

from his purpose; and in consequence his later life failed to realize

the expectations of his early years.

That he was not a Loyalist was probably due in large measure to

environment and his family connections. Considering his temperament,

it is not easy to discover any logical reason why he should have

turned Whig. He had never suffered in his own fortune from existing

arrangements; he was not a political idealist to throw the glamor of

republicanism about the struggle; he had not subjected the colonial

question to critical analysis. He was an academic dilettante,

unconcerned with political principles, little more than an echo of the

Connecticut gentry in such matters; and if he espoused the Whig cause

it is a pretty good indication that Yale College was indoctrinated

in Whig principles. An echo he remained throughout his life. When

later he became a Federalist and enjoyed some of the emoluments of

party victory, and when later still democracy lifted up its head in

Connecticut, wearing the French cockade, and bringing down upon it

the wrath of all respectable people, he reflected faithfully the views

of his class. John Trumbull was a moderate liberal, but no leveler, no

democrat, no friend to Jeffersonian heresies. Democracy he detested

heartily, and he joined with the other Hartford Wits to draw its

portrait in unflattering terms. As a Connecticut gentleman he was

insistent on the supremacy of the tie-wig in government as well as in

society; he would scarcely have been a Connecticut gentleman had he

thought otherwise.

2. Francis Hopkinson, Esq.

If the career of Trumbull indicates that Whiggery existed among the

young collegians of Connecticut, the career of Francis Hopkinson

suggests that the culture of Philadelphia, the great center of

fashion and wit, was Whiggish also. That it should have been so is

the more noteworthy, for the Quaker spirit of Philadelphia was far

less militant than the Puritan spirit of Boston; more peaceful, if

not more conservative. The city had long been dominated by a group

of sober merchants who detested the leveling tendencies of New

England. But the domination of these older men was passing; a younger

generation, more aggressive in trade and speculation, was rising to

power; and that Philadelphia finally went with the Whigs was due to the

influence of these younger merchants. When it became clear that the

commercial interests of men like Robert Morris and George Clymer were

disadvantaged by the connection with England, the ardor of patriotism

grew stronger, and talk of independence became common. No sooner had

business come out for independence than culture swung over; the wit

which would gladly have remained loyal applauded the comments of the

countinghouse, and the newspaper essay reflected the new patriotic

sentiments.

Chief among the Philadelphia wits was Francis Hopkinson, Esq., a

charmingly versatile dilettante, who to the vocation of the law and the

bench of admiralty, joined the polite avocations of painting, music,

natural philosophy, and literature. He was indisputably clever, full of

innumerable sprightly enthusiasms, and master of cultivated speech and

manners. Of his skill in painting and music we cannot judge, but of his

literary accomplishments the record has been preserved. Life seems to

have been an agreeable experience to him, and if his dainty enthusiasms

were a marvel to John Adams,[283] it would indicate that society in

Philadelphia in 1775 was far more refined than in provincial Boston.

Hopkinson possessed ample means to gratify his polite tastes, and

had long moved in the most exclusive circles. The son of an eminent

lawyer, he had received the best education available in the colonies,

after which he went abroad to acquire old-world polish. Some fourteen

months were spent in England, where, as a near kinsman of the Bishop

of Worcester, he frequented the best English society, made the

acquaintance of eminent men, and even enjoyed the distinction of

dining with my Lord North. On his return he prudently fell in love

with an heiress of the Bordens, of Bordentown, and turned Jerseyman

the better to administer his wife’s estates. He entered the law, and

doubtless at the solicitation of his kinsman the Bishop, he became a

beneficiary of ministerial patronage: receiving appointment in 1772

to a sinecure post as collector of customs at Newcastle, and two

years later being made mandamus councilor for New Jersey--a somewhat

hazardous post, considering the nature of the office and the temper

of the people. Already in Massachusetts certain gentlemen had learned

that the compliment of royal recognition might cost too dear a price.

That Hopkinson should have been tendered such an appointment as late as

1774, shows that he was regarded by the ministry as good Tory material.

During the anxious months of 1774, when intelligent Americans were

trying to forecast the outcome of the growing radicalism of the

colonial temper, Hopkinson must have done some serious thinking; with

the result that when in September the Continental Congress assembled

in Philadelphia, he offered to the members as his contribution to the

discussion a clever little allegory wherein the whole question at issue

between England and the colonies was sketched with a light touch that

is an agreeable relief from the arguments of the official debaters. In

_A Pretty Story_ Hopkinson is frankly pro-colonial, and offers his wit

to the service of his country. It is not a great work, but it shows

that he had definitely put aside the ministerial temptation--probably

to the disgust of the good Bishop--and had gone over to the Whigs. Two

years later he took a seat in the Congress, and within a week voted

for the Declaration of Independence, aligning himself against the

conservative group led by his fellow townsman, John Dickinson.

What impelled Hopkinson to so momentous a shift in political

opinion can be explained by no records that have been preserved,

and must remain a matter of conjecture. Even less than Trumbull was

he revolutionary in temper. His Whiggery was probably commercial

in origin, a reflection of the economic interests of the merchant

class with which he mingled. That he went so far as to attack the

aristocratic spirit of the English government--its debauching of public

servants and its sordid motives--may have been due quite as much to a

refined integrity as to partisan advantage; but for an aristocrat to

attack the aristocratic principle of government was unusual as it was

dangerous for his class. But though he turned Whig he was no agrarian

to substitute the majority will for the royal prerogative; and when the

war was over and political re-alignment was under way, Hopkinson went

with his group, became a stout Federalist, defended the Constitution,

and enjoyed his share of the party emoluments. His wit was unembittered

by the acrimonious disputes of Jacobin days, and his partisanship

retained its note of casual sprightliness through the dogdays of the

nineties.

His chief contributions to the debate over the Constitution were _The

New Roof_ and _Objections to the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government

for the United States, on Genuine Principles_. They are delightfully

clever, but the cleverness cannot conceal a good-natured contempt for

the democratic underling and all his ways. The attitude of aristocratic

superiority is the more striking for its easy bearing. The first is

an implied eulogy of James Wilson, Scotch lawyer of Philadelphia, who

as master-architect finds his plans for erecting a splendid roof over

a “certain Mansion-house” violently opposed by Margery, a slattern

midwife, for no better reason than that “in the construction of the

new roof, her apartments would be considerably lessened.” Margery, of

course, is agrarian democracy, and to further her interests she incites

three worthless servants to testify that the old leaky roof is better

than the one proposed. Naturally their flimsy arguments are laughed out

of court, and the wisdom of the architect is apparent to all except a

“half-crazy fellow”[284] who filled the air with his “fustian,” making

himself a general nuisance to the disgust of all respectable people.

In the second of the two works, Hopkinson gives freer rein to his

polite fancy, figuring the opposition to the Constitution under the

form of a Wheelbarrow Society at the city gaol. Within those walled

precincts, he suggests, the most advanced advocates of natural liberty

may be found, and there the monstrous crime of the Constitution is

most eloquently exposed. How foolish is this America that persists in

believing what able lawyers and reputable gentlemen say of the merits

of the document, and refuses to intrust the making of a fundamental law

to such true liegemen of democracy as these knights of the chain-gang!

It is all very witty, and provokes its laugh, and serves its purpose

of heaping on the head of the opposition the class prejudice that was

indignant at the insolence of plebeians in holding contrary views on

a subject quite beyond their comprehension. But times change, and the

sprightliest wit may lose its savor. Those old Federalist skits are as

dead today as the marvelous pageant got up by Hopkinson to celebrate

the adoption of the Constitution, an affair which greatly pleased the

amiable little gentleman, a detailed account of which he prepared

for the definitive edition of his works, where it may be read by the

curious.

If Francis Hopkinson is no very important figure in our literary

history, he is not without significance as a representative of our

colonial culture that deliberately chose to be Whig rather than Tory.

He risked much and he was amply rewarded. For years he sat on the bench

of the Court of Admiralty, sparkled at dinners, and was a respected

and influential member of a genteel society. If the recompense for his

services during the perilous days was greater than fell to the lot of a

democrat like Philip Freneau, who will wonder? Like rewards like, and

the days of democratic rewards were not yet come in America.

II • The Tory Satirists

1. Jonathan Odell

Amongst the occasional writers who dedicated extemporized couplets

to the defense of Toryism in America, there can be no doubt to whom

belongs the primacy. Jonathan Odell was easily first as a purveyor of

virulent Loyalist rhyme. Of the sternest Puritan ancestry, Odell was

educated in medicine, and saw service in the West Indies as surgeon

to his Majesty’s forces. Turning Anglican he was ordained priest

in London, and came home to his native colonies as a missionary, to

further the cause of episcopacy. Busily engaged with parochial duties,

he chose to remain aloof from all political disputes, and during the

early months of the war he refrained from taking sides. Unfortunately,

however, he made acquaintances among some captive British officers,

for whom he wrote a song in honor of the King’s birthday, which was

sung with much drinking of wine on June 4, 1776, the news of which

getting abroad stirred the Whig partisans to anger. Soon thereafter

matters grew too warm for Odell to remain longer neutral; he suffered

certain humiliating personal experiences and was driven to seek refuge

within the British lines. Thenceforth none was more ardent in the royal

cause. He busied himself with innumerable intrigues to undermine the

Whig strength, amongst others serving as a go-between in the unlucky

André-Arnold affair. He remained implacable to the end, and not until

the last Redcoat was withdrawn from the independent states, did he

leave off urging reprisals. When it was all over he withdrew sullenly

to Nova Scotia, was amply rewarded by his King, and sat down to nourish

to the end of a long life the most virulent hatred of all Whigs and

republicans. “Toryissimus,” Professor Tyler calls him, borrowing Sir

Walter’s word; and the term hits to a nicety the bitter arrogant nature

which so closely resembled in its essentials the “proud prelate Laud,”

from whom his ancestors had fled a hundred and fifty years before.

A vigorous man was Jonathan Odell, strong, capable, uncompromising,

possessing a clear intellect and a heart little touched by Christian

charity--a stern Hebraist who would sweep away with the besom of wrath

all the enemies of his God and his King. He felt no hesitation in

making out the list of the proscribed: the enemies of the King were

_ipso facto_ the enemies of God--rebels who were daily signing their

own death warrants in overt acts of treason. Watching the seditious

crew of “Congress men” seducing the colonials into unnatural rebellion

against the best of kings and fathers, he took it to be his Christian

duty to lay the rod of correction upon their shoulders. If they would

not be warned they must be hanged. Not content with active intrigue, he

pressed his pen into service, and during the year 1779 he wrote four

pieces which for bitterness of satire outdid Freneau at his frankest.

Freneau was bitter and brutal in all conscience, but he was never

nasty; there were infamies of personal insult that he would not stoop

to, vulgarities of innuendo that he was not guilty of. If he studied

the art of Churchill, he stopped short of Churchill’s grossness. But

Odell the priest was unhampered by scruple; the meanest gossip found

a place in his “acrid rhyme.” No Christian charity spread its mantle

over the shortcomings of his enemies, no Christian forgiveness found

lodgment in his unforgiving heart. He was a son of the Old Testament

and he girded up his righteousness with prayer.

Ask I too much? then grant me for a time

Some deleterious pow’rs of acrid rhyme:

Some ars’nic verse, to poison with the pen

These rats, who nestle in the Lion’s den![285]

The four satires which embody his holy wrath and which were little

calculated to spread sweetness and light in a world sorely in need of

them, are _The Word of Congress_, _The Congratulation_, _The Feu de

Joie_, and _The American Times_--all written, probably, in the last

months of the year 1779. Of these the first and the last are the most

suggestive in their denunciation. The spirit which prompted him to turn

to satire is given in the preface to the 1780 edition of _The American

Times_.

The masters of Reason have decided, that when doctrines and

practices have been fairly examined, and proved to be contrary to

Truth, and injurious to Society, then and not before may Ridicule

be lawfully employed in the Service of Virtue. This is exactly

the case of the grand American Rebellion; it has been weighed in

the balance, and found wanting: able writers have exposed its

principles, its conduct, and its final aim. Reason has done her

part, and therefore this is the legitimate moment for Satire.

Accordingly the following Piece is offered to the Public. What it

is found to want of Genius, the Author cannot supply; what it may

want of Correction, he hopes the candor of the Public will excuse

on account of the fugitive nature of the subject: next year the

publication would be too late; for in all probability there will

then be no Congress existing.

When we examine the work of Odell to discover the deeper springs of his

thought, we come upon naked class prejudice, undiluted Toryism. His

social philosophy is erected upon that unstable foundation; the actions

of men are judged solely by that light. Of any valid or reasoned

philosophy, social or political, he was as wanting as a child. Of any

real understanding of his fellow Americans who had espoused the Whig

cause, he was as lacking as General Clinton, whose “warfare,” Odell

asserted, “was the war of God.” The colonial grievances which other

Tories acknowledged to have some foundation, Odell casually ignored.

There was no cause in heaven or earth for colonial disloyalty, he

was convinced, except Whiggish perversity, and for such perversity

there must be due punishment--the rope. In his mind’s eye he sees the

“impious crew,” one after another silenced by the halter. There must be

no ill-judged mercy; the best of the rebels must swing with the worst,

for they are all sedition-mongers, all attainted traitors. From his

vast ignorance Odell derived an equally vast confidence in the ultimate

triumph of truth. There is a note of finality in his judgments that

amazes, an infallibility that amuses. The Reverend Jonathan frankly

acknowledges himself to be the boon companion of Reason, the favored

suitor of Truth--from them only has he taken instruction and in their

name he professes to speak. Whereas the Whigs are poor fellows who have

held commerce with neither.

Odell is careful of his workmanship and organizes his materials with

an eye to climax. _The American Times_ is formally divided into three

parts. The poem opens with a summoning of the infernal crew of sedition

and the abuse of them severally, rising to a rhetorical conclusion in

an address to Washington; then the leering portrait of the mother of

all mischiefs. Democracy, is painted; finally comes a pure and lofty

strain which summons Reason to decide in the great cause. Taxation,

Independence, are haled before her august throne and there condemned,

and the whole concludes with a vision of Britannia’s guardian angel

bearing a two-edged sword and proclaiming:

At length the day of Vengeance is at hand:

The exterminating Angel takes his stand:

Hear the last summons, rebels, and relent:

Yet but a moment is there to repent.

Lo! the great Searcher ready at the door,

Who means decisively to purge the floor:

Yes, the wise Sifter now prepares the fan

To separate the meal from useless bran.

Down to the centre from his burning ire

Ye foes of goodness and of truth, retire:

And ye, who now lie humbled in the dust,

Shall raise your heads, ye loyal and ye just;

Th’ approving sentence of your Sovereign gain,

And shine refulgent as the starry train.

Then, when eternal justice is appeas’d;

When with due vengeance heav’n and earth are pleas’d;

America, from dire pollution clear’d,

Shall flourish yet again, belov’d, rever’d:

In duty’s lap her growing sons be nurs’d,

And her last days be happier than her first.[286]

Into this framework Odell has fitted a surprising number of personal

attacks. His ink blots out the good name of every Whig on whom it

drips. To the present generation it furnishes food for wonder to

see what a paltry appearance the fathers make in the verse of this

plain-speaking Tory. Jefferson, Paine, Morris, Adams, Washington, and

a host of others, are shallow creatures, in the judgment of Odell,

bereft of reason, void of honor, the very scum of the revolutionary

pot; whereas Clinton and Gage, Hutchinson and Galloway, are holy

instruments in the hand of God to cleanse the land of pollution. The

attack is rankly and grossly partisan, with no saving grace of humor or

humanity. The alpha and omega of Odell’s political faith was loyalty to

the crown, and the bankruptcy of such a creed in revolutionary America

is nowhere thrust into harsher relief than in the bitter verses of

this bitter heart. Empty Jonathan Odell of prejudice, class interest,

passion for the prerogative, with their corollary of praise for an

unmanly truckling to the King, and nothing remains, the empty sack

collapses. It was a hardship that he should have been driven out of his

native country upon the failure of the King’s cause, but what could

be done with a fellow who insisted that his empty sack was stuffed

with all the virtues? He was harshly intolerant in his Toryism, and he

encountered a victorious republican harshness.

2. Samuel Peters

It is amusing to turn from the implacable Odell to the mendacious

Peters, only to meet with another tale of abortive missionary zeal.

The Anglican clergy played a conspicuous part during the Revolutionary

troubles--a part that in many cases inspired small regard for the

establishment in the minds of a dissenting laity. Not in vain did

the church teach loyalty to authority, for while the British Empire

was breaking asunder, the Anglican ministers were visible pillars of

prerogative and with pen and voice lent effective aid to the royal

cause. Sometimes their ardor outran their intelligence, their devotion

betrayed their discretion; nevertheless their zeal contributed notably

to the number and quality of the Loyalist writings.

For some inconceivable reason Samuel Peters was seized with a desire

to plant the Anglican church in Congregational Connecticut--surely

the strangest of desires and the strangest of men to undertake such

a work. To uplift the banner of episcopacy in a commonwealth that

for over a hundred years had been militantly Separatist, that did

not want bishops and would not have them--here was missionary zeal

that a plain man understands with difficulty. To have made headway

at all there was need of apostolic fervor and an ingratiating tact;

and Samuel Peters possessed neither. He was a gentleman who preened

himself on his quality, exuding in speech and action a pride of caste

that led him to speak of the American farmers as peasants--the only

native Loyalist who thus aped the English. His abilities were far from

mean, but his better qualities were corroded by overweening conceit.

Possessed of all the arrogance of a lord and all the ostentation of a

brewer, he was scarcely the man to serve the Connecticut laity with

due Christian humility. He pointed out the truth authoritatively and

then took it as a personal affront if his hearers failed to agree with

him. And so, after explaining to the Congregationalists of Connecticut

the infallible truth of the Anglican way, and being ready to minister

to them according to that way, he fell into a pet when they refused to

turn churchmen. The more he argued the more he got himself disliked,

and when his tactless loyalism brought down the Sons of Liberty upon

him and he was driven to Boston--whence he sailed for England where he

survived for thirty-one years--he took a spirited revenge by writing

his _History of Connecticut_, a work that solaced the early years of

expatriation, and provided material for many an after argument.

It is an amazingly provocative book, over which the sons of Connecticut

have disputed acrimoniously for a hundred years without coming

to agreement. Fortunately those disputes are of far less concern

today than the political philosophy tucked away in the pages of the

_History_; the scandal is far less interesting than the shrewd comment

on the causes of the American Revolution. Samuel Peters was a high Tory

with the virtue of frankness, which defeat had made the more open. From

his secure refuge in England he looked back upon the revolutionary

upheaval, and his analysis of causes is the more suggestive from the

fact that he had nothing to gain from truckling to popular opinion. His

judgments are interesting even when he exaggerates. The colonial Tory

is no longer serving immediate partisan ends, but after the battle has

been fought and lost he takes a grim pleasure in pointing out to the

English government its costly blunders. Affairs went ill in America,

not because of too much Toryism on the part of government, but because

of too little and too late applied. The explanation of the origin

and spread of unrest in America, Peters regarded as very simple. The

tap-root of the disaffection was republicanism, which through the

criminal negligence of government was not severed in the days when the

plant was small, but which was suffered to grow till the tree could not

be pulled up or destroyed.

It appears to me, that the British government, in the last century,

did not expect New-England to remain under their authority; nor did

the New-Englanders consider themselves as subjects, but allies,

of Great Britain. It seems that England’s intent was to afford an

asylum to the republicans who had been a scourge to the British

constitution; and so, to encourage that restless party to emigrate,

republican charters were granted, and privileges and promises given

them far beyond what an Englishman in England is entitled to.

The emigrants were empowered to make laws, in church and state,

agreeable to their own will and pleasure, without the King’s

approbation.[287]

From the first they have uniformly declared, in church and state,

that America is a new world, subject to the people residing in it;

and that none but enemies to the country would appeal from their

courts to the King in Council. They never have prayed for any

earthly king by name. They always called themselves republicans

and enemies to kingly government.... They hate the idea of a

parliament.... They never have admitted one law of England to be

in force among them, till passed by their assemblies.... They hold

Jesus to be their only King, whom if they love and obey, they will

not submit, because they have not submitted to the laws of the King

of England.[288]

The natural fruits of this pernicious root of republicanism were the

colonial hostility to the monarchical and aristocratic elements of

the British constitution, together with all the domestic turbulence

and lawlessness which have marked the history of New England from the

first. If gentlemen wished an object lesson in republicanism, none

better than Connecticut could be had; there from the earliest days,

“republicanism, schisms, and persecutions,” have gone hand in hand;

and it was to make this clear to the world that Samuel Peters took the

trouble to write his _History_.

In the course of this work, my readers must necessarily have

observed, in some degree, the ill effects of the democratical

constitution of Connecticut. I would wish them to imagine, for

I feel myself unable adequately to describe, the confusion,

turbulence, and convulsion, arising in a province, where not only

every civil officer, from the Governor to the constable, but also

every minister, is appointed as well as paid by the people, and

faction and superstition are established. The clergy, lawyers, and

merchants or traders, are the three efficient parties which guide

the helm of government.... _En rabies vulgi_--I must beg leave to

refer my readers to their own reflections upon such a system of

government as I have here sketched out.[289]

That such a people would respect the King’s laws at a late day, when

those laws lessened their profits, was foolish to expect. There had

been much complaint from ministerial gentlemen in respect to colonial

smuggling; but how idle was it to complain of the natural consequences

of ministerial laxness chronic for a hundred years!

Smuggling is rivetted in the constitutions and practice of the

inhabitants of Connecticut ... and their province is a storehouse

for the smugglers of the neighboring colonies. They conscientiously

study to cheat the King of those duties, which, they say, God and

nature never intended should be paid. From the governor down to

the tithing-man, who are sworn to support the laws, they will aid

smugglers, resist collectors, and mob informers.[290]

In contemplating these open and notorious facts, which every member of

government must have known, Samuel Peters came very near anger at the

gross stupidity of the ministerial policy. The way to have met these

difficulties was plain--the itch of democracy should have been cured

with the salve of aristocracy. The natural leaders in the several

colonies should have been taken care of by a judicious distribution of

titles of nobility.

The people of New-England are rightly stiled republicans: but a

distinction should be made between the learned and unlearned, the

rich and poor. The latter form a great majority; the minority,

therefore, are obliged to wear the livery of the majority, in

order to secure their election into office. Those very republican

gentlemen are ambitious, fond of the power of governing, and grudge

no money nor pains to obtain an annual office. What would they not

give for a dignity depending not on the fickle will of a multitude,

but on the steady reason and generosity of a King?[291]

There was shrewd, unclerical wisdom in the comment of Samuel Peters.

If the gentlemen of England had founded their colonial policy on the

principle of sharing the emoluments of rank and power with ambitious

gentlemen in America, there might well have been quite another story

to tell. But because they begrudged the small rewards, because they

would have the shadow as well as the substance, they lost everything.

An outcome so untoward and so stupid hurt Samuel Peters to the quick;

but it was not his fault, and he doubtless found a crumb of malicious

satisfaction in pointing out the ministerial stupidity after the

mischief was done.

Footnotes

[283] See _Familiar Letters of John and Abigail Adams_, p. 217.

[284] “Philadelphiensis,” one of the anti-Federalist pamphleteers.

[285] _Loyalist Poetry_, p. 55.

[286] _Loyalist Poetry_, p. 36.

[287] _A General History of Connecticut_, Appendix, p. 374.

[288] _Ibid._, p. 290.

[289] _Ibid._, pp. 282-285.

[290] _Ibid._, p. 320.

[291] _Ibid._, p. 377.

Book Three: Liberalism and the Constitution • 1783-1800

Part One: The Agrarian Defeat • 1783-1787

Chapter I • Agrarianism and Capitalism

I • The Background of Ideas • English and French Contributions

With the close of the war the question of the times was the urgent

problem of the form and control of the new political state to be

erected: whether it should be the coercive sovereign of the whole, or

should share its sovereignty with the several states. Although the

problem was political, the forces that were driving to a solution were

economic, and were commonly recognized as such. Agrarian and mercantile

interests opposed each other openly and shaped their political programs

in accordance with their special needs. Not until French romanticism

popularized the doctrine of social equalitarianism was there any

serious questioning of the principle of the economic basis of politics.

The fact of property rule was challenged in America no more than in

England, and the laws of suffrage in the several states were founded

on that principle. The new state, therefore, took its shape from men

who were political realists, deeply read in the republican literature

of the seventeenth century, and inspired by the ideals of the rising

English middle class. The opponents of the new state, on the other

hand, were economic liberals who rejected English middle-class ideals,

and inclined increasingly to the humanitarian theory of the French

thinkers, though with an eye always upon American conditions. The

struggle between these two schools of thought determined the final

outcome of a long and acrimonious contest.

The English middle class had received its creative bent from

seventeenth-century Puritanism. That vast movement survived political

defeat and effected a silent revolution in English character that

projected its ideals far into the future. It permeated the rising

tradesman class, stimulated its ambition, and gave it an ethics

precisely fitted to its needs. In inculcating the doctrine of a sacred

calling to work, it substituted the modern attitude towards production

for the medieval. It rejected the older conception of work for the sake

of a livelihood, of production for consumption, and substituted the

ideal of work for its own sake, of production for the sake of profit.

It implicitly condemned the leisurely, play-loving and pleasure-taking

activities of medieval England, and substituted a drab ideal of

laborious gain, that measured life in terms of material prosperity

and exalted the business of acquisition as the rational end of life.

In the sanction of such an ethics, wealth became the first object of

social desire; and this ideal, that answered the ambitions of the

rising middle class, was preached under the authority of religion. To

labor diligently in the vocation to which one is called of God, it was

believed, was to labor under the great Taskmaster’s eye, and in the

confident hope of eternal reward.

No conceivable discipline was better calculated to breed a utilitarian

race and create a nation of tradesmen. The immediate result was the

emergence of a middle-class, unimaginative, laborious, prudential,

who devoutly believed that the right to rise in the world, to pursue

economic well-being in a competitive society, was the most sacred of

human rights; that those who were faithful in little things, God would

make rulers over great things. To scant one’s service, whether to God

or one’s master, was the cardinal sin; work, thrift, self-denial, were

the cardinal virtues. This amazing revolution in the ethics of work

laid the basis upon which modern England was to rise; it carried in its

loins the industrial revolution. The rise of the new ethics coincided

historically with the final disintegration of the craft guilds, and

the emergence of the great trading companies. It provided a desirable

sanction for the modern principle of exploitation, and the development

of the middleman system of distribution; and these conceptions the

Puritanized English commercial class seized upon eagerly, and in

capable fashion set about the work of creating the system of modern

capitalism.

Every rising group is jealous of its interests and active in asserting

them. It joins forces with whatever movements of current liberalism

promise to further its purpose, but it will see to it that the wider

movement shall serve its narrower ends. The commercial class gathered

strength swiftly during the early seventeenth century, and with the

gentry formed the backbone of discontent with the strong rule of

Strafford. London was growing fast, “the abode of smoke, disease and

democracy,” as a contemporary gentleman phrased it; and the London

burgesses supported Parliament heartily. The new money-economy wanted

to be free from governmental restrictions and exactions, and the

simplest way seemed to lie in asserting parliamentary sovereignty. That

hope was frustrated after 1660 when control of Parliament passed into

the hands of the landed gentry. The aristocracy was too strong for the

middle class, and the latter was forced to buy its privileges in the

open parliamentary market. Not until the intellectual liberalism of

the later eighteenth century clarified its conception of the minimized

state, did the money economy rise to fresh political consciousness, and

then it joined heartily with the new liberalism in an attack upon the

centralized powers of the political state.

The philosophy of this new liberalism was derived largely from two

notable thinkers of the preceding century, Harrington and Locke,

supplemented later by Adam Smith. The influence of the _Oceana_ upon

later thinkers was profound. In grasping and applying the principle of

the economic interpretation of history Harrington laid the foundation

of modern political theory. The true source of political power, he

asserted, is economic power--“empire follows the balance of property.”

The form of government in a given country, whether monarchical,

aristocratic, or democratic, according to the doctrine of economic

determinism, depends upon the ownership of land, whether vested

largely in one, in a minority, or in many. This primary economic power

is modified, however, by the presence in every society of a natural

aristocracy; the authority of character and ability imposes a natural

leadership on those less capable, and disturbs the simple economics

of the situation. Because of the resulting clash of interests,

political stability can be secured only by a judiciously calculated

system of checks; and the system which Harrington elaborated provided

for a bicameral legislature--the aristocratic branch proposing and

debating, and the democratic branch resolving--rotation in office,

and the ballot, to the end that there should be a government of laws

and not of men. His ideal was rulership by the best and wisest under

well-considered laws, circumscribed by a written constitution.

Locke followed Harrington in founding his political theory upon

economics, but he gave to it a characteristically middle-class

interpretation. Harrington had been primarily concerned with a land

economy; Locke was to become unconsciously a spokesman of a money

economy. The persistent problem of that economy was the security of

private property against sequestration, and the ultimate effect of

Locke’s teachings was to secure and strengthen the rights of property

in the state. In basing his doctrine of property ownership upon labor,

he prepared the way for a conception of economic power dissociated

from land. In the universal communism which marks the state of nature,

he argued, private property rights result from labor bestowed, and

are ethically and socially valid. But in such a state of nature, the

possession and enjoyment of property thus detached from the communal

whole are at constant hazards. “The great and chief end, therefore, of

men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government,

is the preservation of their property.”[292] If such was the original

purpose for which government was instituted among men, it follows that

government must regard property rights with particular tenderness;

for if the state prove untrustworthy, the original compact upon

which it was erected is dissolved, and society returns to a state of

nature. Locke therefore went far in asserting the inviolable rights of

property, laying it down as a guiding principle that the sovereign in

time of war may lawfully enforce conscription upon the bodies and lives

of his subjects, but not upon their property. “The supreme power cannot

take from any man any part of his property without his own consent,”

for “to invade the fundamental law of property” is to subvert “the end

of government.”[293] In thus asserting the sacredness of property,

Locke laid the foundation of the new philosophy of capitalism.

As English capitalism grew stronger it began to envisage more

critically the fundamental problem of the powers and functions of the

political state. A state controlled by the landed interests, given to

imposing vexatious restrictions upon trade, could not answer its needs;

freedom rather than regulation was requisite to healthy development.

From the Physiocratic teachings had come the new conception that

economic well-being cannot be imposed from above by governmental

paternalism, but results from untrammeled individual enterprise. The

great concern of government should be to assist and not hamper industry

and trade; political policies should follow and serve commercial

interests. Thus was provided the background from which emerged

_The Wealth of Nations_, the declaration of independence of modern

capitalism. Adam Smith completed the work of Locke, and gave definite

form to the middle-class liberalism of eighteenth-century England, a

liberalism that in the pursuit of commercial freedom found it desirable

to limit the powers of the state. The Tory state had been centralized

and paternal, the capitalistic state was to be reduced to the position

of umpire between competitors. The net results, thus, of two hundred

years of English middle-class struggle to free its economic ambitions

from governmental restrictions was the conception of the social,

political, and economic sufficiency of _laissez faire_. “Let alone” had

been erected into a fetish.

In France, on the other hand, the economic interpretation of history

dominated political thinking far less than in England, and the liberal

movement owed more to a group of intellectuals than to the middle

class. The French leaders were a remarkable group, far removed in

temper from Harrington and Locke and Adam Smith. The Physiocrats were

agrarians and the romantics were humanitarians. They followed the path

of logic to broad principles. As leadership passed from Montesquieu to

Rousseau, French liberalism abandoned the cautious historical appeal,

and turned to generalization that carried far beyond liberalism. The

Rousseau school became advanced radicals, aiming at the regeneration

of society as a whole, seeking political justice by a universal appeal

to reason. This explains the breadth and suggestiveness of their

thinking, as well as the smallness of their immediate achievement. In

seeking much they overreached accomplishment, for they had behind them

no disciplined, class-conscious group, pursuing definite ends. But in

outrunning their own time, they became leaders of later times; and the

unfulfilled program of Rousseau carried over to become the inspiration

of later humanitarianism.

The creative impulse of French romantic philosophy was a passionate

social idealism. A disciple of Locke, Rousseau went further than

his master and translated politics and economics into sociology.

That a juster, more wholesome social order should take the place of

the existing obsolete system; that reason and not interests should

determine social institutions; that the ultimate ends to be sought were

universal liberty, equality, and fraternity--such in brief were the

main conceptions of his philosophy. “Regard for the general good” must

be accepted as the sole test of laws and institutions. He attacked the

problem by way of psychology, essaying a revaluation of human nature.

Incalculable harm had been done, and grave mistakes made, Rousseau

believed, by the old slanderous interpretation; to assume that every

man is a knave, governed solely by self-interest, was an assumption

contrary to fact. It was a generalization deduced from certain acquired

characteristics. If in a competitive society men prove to be selfish,

ambitious of power and distinction, brutal in seeking egoistic ends,

the blame attaches to a vicious social system that has debased them

from their natural state. In a state of nature men are kindly,

rational, sociable; but in society the great rewards fall to the

self-seeking. A ruthless social order is forever perverting the natural

man; whereas if social rewards were bestowed on the social-minded,

the innate sense of justice would speedily modify and control the

impulse to egoism. The solution of the vexing social problem, Rousseau

concluded, lay in a return to a state of nature, where under the

determining influence of wholesome environment the individual should

develop naturally, unperverted by false standards and unjust rewards.

French radicalism, then, was driving in the same direction with English

liberalism, but it went much further. Both desired a loosening of the

machinery of centralized power as represented by the political state;

but whereas English liberalism protested against a paternalism that

diminished its profits, French radicalism struck at the principle

of centralization. Political institutions it regarded as artificial

agencies for the purposes of exploitation--the state was little more

than a tax machine; whereas the living source and wellspring of every

true civilization is social custom, voluntary association, free

exchange. The root of French radicalism was anarchistic, and its ideal

was an agrarian society of free-holders. It would sweep away the long

accumulated mass of prescriptive rights, the dead hand of the past,

and encourage free men to create a new society that should have as

its sole end and justification, the common well-being. A pronounced

individualism characterized both movements, French and English; but

in the one case it was humanitarian, appealing to reason and seeking

social justice, in the other it was self-seeking, founded on the right

of exploitation, and looking toward capitalism.

During the period with which we are concerned, American thought, become

militantly self-conscious but still vague and inchoate touching any

ultimate program, drew inspiration from both sources; but the deeper,

controlling influence came finally to be English rather than French.

The common doctrine of decentralization fitted American conditions,

but to many Americans decentralization, whether social or political,

had proved undesirable. The common doctrine of liberty accorded with

the passions released by the Revolution, but the French humanitarian

conceptions of equality and fraternity found little response in a

middle-class, competitive world. On the contrary, the English doctrine

of economic individualism made universal appeal. In presence of vast,

unpreëmpted resources, the right of every man to preëmpt and exploit

what he would, was synonymous with individual liberty. Any government

which should endeavor to limit such exploitation would be bitterly

assailed; and if the small man were free to enjoy his petty privilege,

the greater interests might preëmpt unchallenged. The total influence

of old-world liberalism upon the America of post-war days was,

therefore, favorable to capitalistic development and hostile to social

democracy. Until the early years of the nineties the democratic spirit

of French radicalism was little understood in America, and the field

remained free to the English middle-class philosophy, which appealed

equally to the agrarian and the capitalistic groups.

II • The Political Situation

Against this background of ideas, the political tactics of the year

1787 are sufficiently comprehensible. Two major problems had been

settled by the war, namely, that henceforth the exploitation of America

was to remain the prerogative of Americans, and that in the new country

there was no place for a king or a titled aristocracy. But with these

preliminaries settled, the problem remained to determine the form and

powers of a national government. Should that government be entrusted

with coercive sovereignty, or should it remain the titular head of

confederated sovereign commonwealths? The latter solution had been

accepted during the period of war, and in proposing abolition of the

Articles of Confederation and the substitution of a new instrument, the

burden of proof fell upon the advocates of the new. How the problem

was met and the solution achieved by a skillful minority in face of

a hostile majority is a suggestive lesson in political strategy. It

is a classic example of the relation of economics to politics; of the

struggle between greater property and smaller property for control of

the state.

The strategic position of the large property interests in the year

1787 was favorable to a bold stroke. In the northern and middle

states the controlling influence was wielded by a powerful money

group that had been slowly rising during pre-Revolutionary days,

and had greatly increased its resources and augmented its prestige

as a result of war financing and speculation in currency and lands.

They at once assumed the leadership which before had belonged to

the gentry. Like all eighteenth-century realists they exhibited a

frank property-consciousness that determined all their moves. With

them affiliated such members of the older gentry as remained, the

professional classes, ambitious Revolutionary officers who had set up

the militant Order of the Cincinnati, together with a numerous body

of the disappointed and the disaffected; the net result of which was

a close working alliance of property and culture for the purpose of

erecting a centralized state with coercive powers. They were powerfully

aided by two outstanding characteristics of the eighteenth-century

mind: an aristocratic psychology which was deeply ingrained in the

colonial through the long unchallenged rule of the gentry; and the

universal belief in the stake-in-society theory of government,

evidenced by the general disfranchisement of non-property-holders.

Property had always ruled in America, openly and without apology,

and the money group could count on a spontaneous response to its

demand that property should reorganize the feeble central government

and set up one more to its liking. In the South this reorganization

was unnecessary, for the planter aristocracy, in siding with the

Revolution, remained masters of their society, and the money group

had not risen to challenge their supremacy. It remained only for the

northern interests to join forces with the planters to bring the great

property interests of the country under one banner.

The status of the small property holders, on the other hand, was much

less happy. They were in possession of many of the state governments,

and were strongly wedded to the Articles of Confederation; but they

were deep in populism and their agrarian measures offered rallying

points for a powerful opposition. They lacked disciplined cohesion and

were wanting in a broad program. The militant mood of Revolutionary

days had given place to suspicion and disillusion, and their fighting

strength was greatly weakened. They were suffering the fate of all

post-war governments. The widespread depression was attributed to

populist policies, and all the evils from which the country was

suffering were laid at the doors of agrarian legislatures. Under such

conditions the political strategy of the money group was predetermined.

The issue was ready-made. Astute politicians like Hamilton seized the

opportunity and crystallized the discontent by the ingenious argument

that the trouble was too much agrarianism, that agrarianism resulted

from too much democracy, and that the inevitable end of too much

democracy was universal anarchy. The root of all the troubles, it was

asserted, was the pernicious slackness of the Articles of Confederation

which prevented a vigorous administration. There could be no prosperity

until a competent national government was set up on a substantial basis.

The inevitable consequence was that the ideal of popular democratic

rule received a sharp setback. The aristocratic prejudices of the

colonial mind were given a more militant bias by skillful propaganda.

Democracy was pictured as no other than mob rule, and its ultimate

purpose the denial of all property rights. Populistic measures were

fiercely denounced as the natural fruit of democratic control; all

America was in danger of following the destructive example of New

Hampshire and Rhode Island. “Look at the Legislature of Rhode Island,”

exclaimed a speaker in the New York Constitutional Convention, “what

is it but the perfect picture of a mob!” The virus of democracy

was a poison that destroyed the character of the people as well as

government; was not the fate of Rhode Island a warning to the rest

of the country? Here is a picture of that commonwealth, drawn by an

English gentleman before agrarianism had done its worst.

The government of this province is entirely democratical, every

officer, except the collector of the customs, being appointed ...

either immediately by the people, or by the general assembly....

The character of the Rhode Islanders is by no means engaging,

or amiable, a circumstance principally owing to their form of

government. Their men in power, from the highest to the lowest, are

dependent upon the people, and frequently act without that strict

regard to probity and honour, which ought invariably to influence

and direct mankind. The private people are cunning, deceitful, and

selfish: they live almost entirely by unfair and illicit trading.

Their magistrates are partisan and corrupt: and it is folly to

expect justice in their courts of judicature; for he who has the

greatest purse is generally found to have the fairest cause.... It

is needless, after this, to observe that it is in a very declining

state.[294]

“Under the Articles of Confederation,” comments a recent student,

“populism had a free hand, for majorities in the state legislatures

were omnipotent. Any one who reads the economic history of the time

will see why the solid conservative interests of the country were

weary of the talk about the ‘rights of the people,’ and were bent upon

establishing firm guarantees for the rights of property.”[295] The

money-economy had made up its mind that such government as that of

Rhode Island could not longer be tolerated. An example must be made of

such hotbeds of anarchy; if reason would not be listened to, force must

be used. An ardent Federalist, Judge Dana of Massachusetts, offered a

possible solution:

This state [Rhode Island] will not choose delegates to the

convention, nor order on their delegates to Congress. I hope they

will not, as their neglect will give grounds to strike it out of

the union, and divide its territory between their neighbors....

According to my best observation, such a division of this state

would meet the best approbation of the commercial part of it,

though they are afraid to take any open measures in the present

state of things, to bring it about. Their interest must dictate

such a measure; they never can be secure under the present form

of government, but will always labor under the greatest mischief

any people can suffer, that of being ruled by the most ignorant

and unprincipled of their fellow citizens. This state is too

insignificant to have a place on an equal footing with any of

the others in the Union, unless it be Delaware. Therefore a

bold politician would seize upon the occasion their abominable

anti-federal conduct presents, for annihilating them as a separate

member of the Union.[296]

“It is fortunate,” wrote General Varnum to Washington, confirming Judge

Dana’s analysis of the economic divisions of Rhode Island, “that the

wealth and resources of this state are chiefly in possession of the

well affected, and they are entirely devoted to the public good.”

It was Shays’s Rebellion, that militant outbreak of populism that

set all western Massachusetts in uproar, and spread to the very

outskirts of Boston, which crystallized the anti-democratic sentiment,

and aroused the commercial group to decisive action. With its armed

attack upon lawyers and courts, its intimidation of legislators, its

appeal for the repudiation of debts, it provided the object lesson

in democratic anarchy which the “friends of law and order” greatly

needed. The revolt was put down, but the fear of democracy remained

and called aloud for stronger government. “We see the situation we are

in,” exclaimed a Boston member in the Massachusetts Constitutional

Convention. “We are verging toward destruction, and every one must be

sensible of it.” Shays had failed, but with political power in the

hands of agrarian legislatures, friendly to debtors, what dangers must

not the future hold in store? Was it not the patriotic duty of the

sober conservators of society to set up betimes a strong constitutional

defense, before the rights of property were swept away by the fierce

tide of democracy? Writing to Washington under date of October 23,

1786, General Knox argued:

On the very first impression of faction and licentiousness, the

fine theoretic government of Massachusetts has given way, and its

laws are trampled under foot.... Their creed is, that the property

of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of

Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be

the common property of all.... This dreadful situation, for which

our government have made no adequate provision, has alarmed every

man of principle and property in New England. They start as from a

dream, and ask what can have been the cause of this delusion? What

is to give us security against the violence of lawless men? Our

government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives

and property. We imagined that the mildness of our government and

the wishes of the people were so correspondent that we were not as

other nations, requiring brutal force to support the laws. But we

find we are men--actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions

belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government

proper and adequate for him. The people of Massachusetts ... are

far advanced in this doctrine, and the men of property and the men

of station and principle there, are determined to establish and

protect them in their lawful pursuits.... Something is wanting and

something must be done.[297]

During these years of unrest the problem of a new fundamental law

was carefully studied by the anti-agrarian leaders and solutions

suggested. A remarkable change had come over their thinking. They

discarded the revolutionary doctrines that had served their need in the

debate with England. They were done with natural rights and romantic

interpretations of politics and were turned realists. They parted

company with English liberalism in its desire for a diminished state.

Their economic interests were suffering from the lack of a strong

centralized government, and they were in a mood to agree with earlier

realists who held that men are animals with turbulent passions, and

require a government “proper and adequate” for animals; and in view

of local agrarian majorities, a proper and adequate government could

not be had without a strong centralized state. The solution, they

were convinced, lay in a return to some form of seventeenth-century

republicanism, possibly modeled after Harrington, but with further

checks upon the power of the democratic branch of the legislature, and

a stronger executive. Hobbes with his leviathan monarchy had gone too

far, but he had, at least, understood the need of a strong state; and a

strong state, subservient to their interests, the business and landed

groups were determined to set up as a barrier against a threatening

agrarianism.

The great obstacle to such a program was the political power of the

farmers, bred up in the traditional practice of home rule, jealous of

local rights, and content with the Articles of Confederation. These

home rulers would not take kindly to any suggestion of a centralized

state, even though it should be republican in form. The thing must be

done skillfully, if it were to succeed. To nullify where they could not

override the political power of the agrarians, therefore, became the

practical problem of the money-economy. The fear aroused by Shays’s

Rebellion provided the strategic opportunity, and the best brains of

the country suggested the method. The struggle had begun which was to

provide a new fundamental law for the United States.

Footnotes

[292] _Second Treatise on Civil Government_, Chapter IX.

[293] _Ibid._, Chapter XI.

[294] Burnaby, _Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America

in the Years 1759 and 1760_.

[295] Beard, _The Supreme Court and the Constitution_.

[296] Austin, _Life of Elbridge Gerry_, Vol. II, pp. 66-67.

[297] Brooks, _Henry Knox_, pp. 194-195.

Chapter II • The Great Debate

When one considers the bulk of commentary that has grown up about

the Constitution, it is surprising how little abstract political

speculation accompanied its making and adoption. It was the first

response to the current liberal demand for written constitutions as a

safeguard against tyranny, but it was aimed at the encroachments of

agrarian majorities rather than at Tory minorities. It was the work

of able lawyers and men of affairs confronting a definite situation,

rather than of political philosophers; and it was accompanied

by none of that searching examination of fundamental rights and

principles which made the earlier Puritan and later French debate

over constitutional principles so rich in creative speculation. Not a

single political thinker comparable to the great English and French

philosophers emerged from the struggle. The debate drew freely upon the

materials supplied by those thinkers, but it added little that was new.

The Constitution was a venture in republicanism, on a scale and under

conditions without historical precedent. It was inevitable, therefore,

that the debate should concern itself greatly with the nature of

republicanism and its adaptability to American conditions. As the

argument developed, two major questions assumed critical importance:

the question of the powers of the Federal state, and the question of

the sovereign rights of the majority; and in dealing with both the

debaters were on ground inadequately surveyed. Of definite republican

theory little was available except the writings of a small group of

seventeenth-century republicans. Of democratic theory, on the other

hand, even less was available. American democratic aspiration had

far outrun old-world liberalism, and had produced no independent

speculation of its own. French democratic theory still awaited the rise

of Jacobinism to clarify its principles. The party of Commonwealth

Levelers, to be sure, with their doctrines of a “paramount law,”

manhood suffrage, and annual parliaments, offered much that might have

proved suggestive; but the literature of the Levelers was buried too

deep under Tory obloquy to be resurrected, and nowhere else was to be

found any considerable body of democratic theory. It was inevitable,

therefore, that the debaters should go back to the English liberals of

the preceding century.

Consider for a moment the authorities bandied to and fro in the great

debate. With such exceptions as Machiavelli, Vattel, Pufendorf,

Montesquieu, they were the well-known English theorists, Hobbes,

Harrington, Milton, Sidney, Halifax, Hume, and Blackstone. Unhappily

for the democrats every one of these great names counted against

their aspirations. Hobbes was a state absolutist whose _Leviathan_

provided sharp weapons for those who wished to tone the government

high; Hume was a Tory who accepted the traditional interpretation of

human nature in the light of which democracy was the open door to

anarchy; Blackstone was a Tory lawyer, who interpreted the British

constitution by a narrow legalism that was obsolete before the

_Commentaries_ came from the press. Harrington, Milton, and perhaps

Sidney, were republicans of strong aristocratic bias, and Halifax

and Locke--the latter by much the most influential of all--were

constitutional monarchists.[298] Every one of these great authorities

either distrusted or violently condemned democracy, yet they provided

the major body of theory made use of by the Federalists.