Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
with them, and joined heartily in the stimulating work of providing
a democratic constitution for Pennsylvania. During the later years
of reaction following the peace, when so many Revolutionary leaders
endeavored to stay the agrarian movement and undo its work, he saw
no cause to lose faith in government immediately responsive to the
majority will. He was a forerunner of Jefferson, like him firm in the
conviction that government was good in the measure that it remained
close to the people. He sat in the Constitutional Convention as one of
the few democrats, and although he was unable to make headway against
the aristocratic majority, he was quite unconvinced by their rhetoric.
For years he had been an advocate of unrestricted manhood suffrage,
annual parliaments,[190] and a single-chamber legislature; and when he
heard eloquent young lawyers argue that a single-chamber legislature,
responsive to a democratic electorate, must lead to mob legislation,
and that good government required a carefully calculated system of
checks and balances, he remarked:
It appears to me ... like putting one horse before a cart and the
other behind it, and whipping them both. If the horses are of equal
strength, the wheels of the cart, like the wheels of government,
will stand still; and if the horses are strong enough the cart will
be torn to pieces.[191]
When in 1790 it was proposed to substitute a bicameral system for the
single-chamber in Pennsylvania, Franklin came to the defense of the
simpler, more democratic form, with a vivacity little staled by years:
Has not the famous political fable of the snake, with two heads and
one body, some useful instruction contained in it? She was going
to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a
twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on
the right side of the twig, the other on the left; so that time was
spent in the contest, and before the decision was completed, the
poor snake died with thirst.[192]
Both his economic principles and his views on government have been
condemned by Federalistic critics as tainted with populism. They both
sprang from the same root of agrarian democracy. Whether Franklin
or his critics more adequately represented the larger interests of
eighteenth-century America is beside the present question; it is enough
to note that all such criticism is leveled primarily at Franklin’s
democratic philosophy as a thing in itself undesirable, if not
dangerous.
Franklin may often have been wrong, but he was never arrogant, never
dogmatic. He was too wise and too generous for that. In the midst
of prosperity he never forgot the unprosperous. All his life his
sympathy went out to whoever suffered in person or fortune from the
injustice of society: to the debtor who found himself pinched by the
shrinking supply of currency; to the black slave who suffered the most
elementary of wrongs; to impressed seamen; to the weak and wretched
of earth. He was a part of that emerging humanitarian movement which,
during the last half of the eighteenth century, was creating a new
sense of social responsibility. True to his Physiocratic convictions,
Franklin was social-minded. He was concerned not with property or class
interests, but with the common welfare; and in his quick sympathy for
all sorts and conditions of men, in his conviction that he must use
his talents to make this world better and not exploit it, he reveals
the breadth and generosity of his nature. Reason and work, in his
pragmatic philosophy, are the faithful handmaids of progress, of which
war, whether public or private, is the utter negation. After long
years of thought he rendered a judgment which later experience has not
reversed,--“there is no good war and no bad peace.”
It is to little purpose that certain shortcomings of Franklin are dwelt
upon. “There is a flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of
chivalry, that you must not require of Franklin,” said Sainte-Beuve;
a judgment that is quite true and quite obvious. A man who is less
concerned with the golden pavements of the City of God than that the
cobblestones on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia should be well and
evenly laid, who troubles less to save his soul from burning hereafter
than to protect his neighbors’ houses by organizing an efficient
fire-company, who is less regardful of the light that never was on
sea or land than of a new-model street lamp to light the steps of the
belated wayfarer--such a man, obviously, does not reveal the full
measure of human aspiration. Franklin ended as he began, the child
of a century marked by sharp spiritual limitations. What was best
in that century he made his own. In his modesty, his willingness to
compromise, his openmindedness, his clear and luminous understanding,
his charity--above all, in his desire to subdue the ugly facts of
society to some more rational scheme of things--he proved himself a
great and useful man, one of the greatest and most useful whom America
has produced.
Footnotes
[172] “You know,” wrote Franklin to his wife on the eve of his
departure, “that I have many enemies ... and very bitter ones; and
you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you.” He
was forced to slip away and get secretly on board the vessel. His
activities were reproved thus by a certain Tory lady:
Oh! had he been wise to pursue
The track for his talents designed,
What a tribute of praise had been due
To the teacher and friend of mankind.
But to covet political fame
Was in him a degrading ambition,
The spark that from Lucifer came,
And kindled the blaze of sedition.
(In _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 267.)
In Sargent’s _Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan
Odell_, these verses are attributed to a less likely source.
[173] _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 398.
[174] _Ibid._, Vol. V, p. 81.
[175] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 428. A good deal of light is thrown upon the
ways of the ministry in Franklin’s account, _Negotiations in London_.
See in particular pp. 37, 68, 76 of Vol. V, where Lord Hyde and Lord
Howe exhibit special solicitude for his advancement. His letters tell
of successive attempts to approach him, and among his works is a
little skit in which he speaks of himself thus: “Your correspondent
_Brittannicus_ inveighs violently against Dr. Franklin, for his
ingratitude to the ministry of this nation, who have conferred upon
him so many favors. They gave him the post-office of America: they
made his son a governor; and they offered him a post of five hundred a
year in the salt-office, if he would relinquish the interests of his
country; but he has had the wickedness to continue true to it, and is
as much an American as ever. As it is a settled point in government
here, that every man has his price, it is plain they are bunglers in
their business, and have not given him enough.” (_Works_, Vol. IV, pp.
534-535.)
[176] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 146.
[177] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, pp. 215, 505.
[178] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 177.
[179] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 254.
[180] P. 64.
[181] See _Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty_, Cambridge Press, Vol. I,
pp. 43-51.
[182] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 19.
[183] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 376.
[184] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 438.
[185] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 401.
[186] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 323.
[187] See “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, etc.,” in _Ibid._,
Vol. II, p. 436.
[188] “On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry,” in _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp.
448-451.
[189] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 282. For Franklin’s views on American
representation in Parliament, see Vol. VII, pp. 315, 329.
[190] See the pamphlet indorsed _Some Good Whig Principles_, of the
probable date of 1768-69, in _Works_, Vol. II.
[191] _Works of Thomas Paine_, edited by Moncure D. Conway, Vol. IV, p.
465.
[192] In “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the
Constitution of Pennsylvania,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 167.
Part Two: The Awakening of the American Mind • 1763-1783
Chapter I • Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule
I • Background Facts
The American Revolution remains after a hundred and fifty years
somewhat of a puzzle to historians. Much careful investigation has
been done in the last two decades, but we still know too little to
speak confidently or with a sense of finality. The appeal to arms would
seem to have been brought about by a minority of the American people,
directed by a small group of skillful leaders, who like Indian scouts,
covered their tracks so cleverly that only the keenest trailers can
now follow their course and understand their strategy. On the other
hand, the philosophy of revolution is familiar to us. Revolutions
are born of an abnormal state of mind, sensitized by an accumulated
body of experience. They are psychological explosions, resulting from
irritations commonly economic in origin, and they are conditioned in
their programs by the stock of knowledge and aspiration peculiar to
their time and place. Two determining facts, then, would seem to lie
at the root of the American Revolution: the American psychology which
shaped the colonial outlook, and the peculiar situation of the British
Empire at the close of the French and Indian war.[193]
In old age John Adams “hazarded an opinion, that the true history of
the American revolution could not be recovered,” for “the revolution
was effected before the war commenced. The revolution was in the
minds and hearts of the people.”[194] Accepting Adams’s thesis of a
change in American psychology, we may hazard a further opinion that
the revolution resulted from the emergence in the two countries of
divergent interpretations of the theory and practice of sovereignty,
which may be sufficiently distinguished by the terms local home rule
and imperial centralization. In the beginning it was a clash of
jurisdiction between colonial self-government and absentee paternalism;
but later it developed into an open challenge of the monarchical
principle. A popular will to self-rule had long been developing in
America, and when the outbreak of hostilities clarified its latent
objective, it speedily asserted a conscious republican purpose. To
many of the early supporters of the colonial protest, this republican
outcome was unforeseen and deeply regretted; but it was implicit in
the whole history of colonial development, and must ultimately stand
sharply revealed, once its aspirations were balked.
If the crisis was precipitated almost casually by the program of
parliamentary regulation, the long drift towards alienation was far
from casual. An American mind had been created by the silent pressure
of environment. A large measure of economic freedom had developed
an American liberalism, frankly and vigorously individualistic. It
was not consciously democratic, or even republican. There were few
avowed democrats in the stolid mass of colonial provincialism; a busy
and commonplace routine offered little opportunity for revolutionary
appeal to a people grown lethargic from economic abundance. Of social
unrest, the common fuel of revolutionary fires, there was practically
none; and but for a blundering ministerial imperialism that challenged
this nascent liberalism, throwing over it the mantle of patriotism,
the colonies would have written a very different history. Once the
crisis was precipitated, however, and it became clear that imperial
centralization was encroaching upon local rights, the liberal impulses
in the background of the American mind assumed a militant form and
purpose.
The existence of this native liberalism had been stupidly overlooked
and ignored by responsible statesmen. With the exception of Franklin,