It was a strange revolution that Americans had begun, one that on the face of it is not easily comprehended. A series of trade acts and tax levies do not seem to add up to a justification for independence. There was none of the legendary tyranny of history that had so often driven desperate peoples into rebellion. Yet by 1776 most Americans agreed with John Adams that they were “in the very midst of a Revolution, the most compleat, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the History of Nations.” How then was it to be explained and justified?
Those Americans who looked back at what they had been through could only marvel at the moderation and rationality of their Revolution. It was, said Edmund Randolph of Virginia, a revolution “without an immediate oppression, without a cause depending so much on hasty feeling as theoretic reasoning.” Because the Americans, as Edmund Burke pointed out in one of his famous speeches in 1775, “augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze,” they anticipated grievances even before they actually suffered them. Thus the American Revolution has always seemed to be an unusually intellectual and conservative affair—carried out not to create new liberties but to preserve old ones.
Throughout the imperial crisis American patriot leaders insisted that they were rebelling not against the principles of the English constitution, but on behalf of them. In order to express continuity with the great struggles for political liberty in England, they invoked historic English party designations and called themselves “Whigs,” and branded the supporters of the crown “Tories.” By emphasizing that it was the letter and spirit of the English constitution that justified their resistance, Americans could easily believe that they were simply protecting what Englishmen had valued from the beginning of their history.
Yet the colonists were mistaken in believing that they were struggling only to return to the essentials of the English constitution. The principles of the constitution that they defended were not those that were held by the English establishment in the mid eighteenth century. In fact, the Americans’ principles were, as the Tories and royal officials tried to indicate, “revolution principles” outside the mainstream of English thought. Since the colonists seemed to be reading the same literature as other Englishmen, they were hardly aware that they were seeing the English tradition differently. Despite their breadth of reading and references, however, they concentrated on a set of ideas that ultimately gave them a peculiar conception of English life and an extraordinarily radical perspective on the English constitution they were so fervently defending.
The heritage of liberal thought that the colonists drew on was composed not simply of the political treatises of notable philosophers like John Locke but also of the writings of such eighteenth-century coffeehouse pamphleteers as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Indeed, during the first half of the eighteenth century many of England’s leading literary figures, such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, wrote out of a deep and bitter hostility to the great political, social, and economic changes they saw taking place around them. These critics thought that traditional values were being corrupted and that England was being threatened with ruin by the general commercialization of English life, as seen in the rise of such institutions as the Bank of England, powerful stock companies, stock markets, and the huge public debt. Believing that the crown was ultimately responsible for these changes, many of these writers championed a so-called “country” opposition to the deceit and luxury of the “court,” which they associated with the crown and its networks of influence.
This country opposition had a long and complicated history in England. It stretched back at least to the early seventeenth century, to the Puritan opposition to the established church and the courts of the early Stuart kings, James I and Charles I. The English Civil War of the mid seventeenth century can in part be understood as an uprising of the local gentry, representing the counties or the “country” of England in the House of Commons, against the “court” surrounding the Church of England and the king. Such localist and grassroots opposition to far-removed central authorities was a recurring theme in English history as it would continue to be in American history.
In the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, writers in this country-opposition tradition were especially fearful that executive power—particularly as it operated under the ministries of Sir Robert Walpole—was corrupting Parliament and English society in order to erect a fiscal-military state for the waging of war. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, these defenders of political liberty made ringing proposals to reduce and control what seemed to be the enormously expanded powers of the crown. Their goal was to recover the rights of the people and the original principles of the English constitution.
Many of the reforms they proposed were ahead of their time for England—reforms that advocated the right to vote for all adult males and not just the well-to-do property-holders, more liberty for the press, and greater freedom of religion. Other suggested reforms aimed at prohibiting salaried government “placemen” from sitting in the House of Commons, at reducing the public debt, and at obtaining such popular rights as equal representation for more people, the power to instruct members of Parliament, and shorter Parliaments. All these reform proposals combined into a widely shared conception of how political life in England should ideally be organized. In this ideal nation the parts of the constitution would be independent of one another, and members of Parliament would be independent of any “connection” or party. In other words, there would exist a political world in which no man would be beholden to another.
The Americans had long felt the relevance of these “country” ideas more keenly than the English themselves. These ideas had helped to explain the simple character of American life in contrast with the sophistication of England. But these opposition ideas had also justified the colonists’ habitual antagonism to royal power. In the conflicts between the colonial assemblies and the royal governors in the first half of the eighteenth century, Americans had invoked these ideas off and on. Now, however, in the years after 1763, the need to explain the growing controversy with Britain gave this country-opposition ideology a new and comprehensive importance. It not only prepared the colonists intellectually for resistance, but also offered them a powerful justification of their many differences from what seemed to be a decayed and corrupted mother country.
These inherited ideas contained an elaborate set of rules for political action by the people. How were the people to identify a tyrant? How long should the people put up with abuses? How much force should they use? The answers to these questions came logically as events unfolded, and led the colonists almost irresistibly from resistance to rebellion. Step-by-step the colonists became convinced that the obnoxious efforts of crown officials to reform the empire were not simply the result of insensitivity to unique American conditions or mistakes of well-meant policy. Instead, Americans saw these as the intended consequences of a grand tyrannical design. In Thomas Jefferson’s words the British reforms were nothing less than “a deliberate systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”
America, the colonists believed, was the primary object of this tyrannical conspiracy, but the goals of the conspiracy ranged far beyond the colonies. Americans were involved not simply in a defense of their own rights, but in a worldwide struggle for the salvation of liberty itself. When they looked over the past several centuries of European history, all they could see were the efforts of monarchs everywhere to build up state power in order to extract money from their subjects for the waging of war. By the late 1760s royal tyranny seemed to be gaining more ground, even in England itself. Americans earlier had read of the prosecution of the English radical John Wilkes for criticizing His Majesty’s government in his North Briton, No. 45, and had made Wilkes and the number 45 part of their political symbolism. Then in 1768, Wilkes’s four successive expulsions from a corrupt House of Commons, despite his repeated reelection by his constituents, marked for many Americans the twilight of representative government in Great Britain. Everywhere liberty appeared to be in retreat before the forces of tyranny. The struggles of “sons of liberty” in Ireland to win constitutional concessions were suppressed. The attempts of the freedom fighter Pascal Paoli and his followers to establish the independence of Corsica from France in the 1760s ended in failure. As Americans learned of these setbacks, they became convinced that America was the only place where a free popular press still existed and where the people could still elect representatives who spoke for them and them only.
By 1776 their picture of the immense struggle they were involved in was complete. And they could respond enthusiastically, as lovers of humanity and haters of tyranny, to the passionate appeal of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to stand forth for liberty:
Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.