Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
returned incredible revenues to Great Britain; but the Tory ministry
was not intelligent enough to let sleeping dogs lie. A sentimental
attachment had kept America loyal. So long as his customary and
traditional rights remained undisturbed, the colonial would throw
up his cap for King George; but if he were driven to choose between
loyalty and self-interest, between sentiment and profit, the choice
was certain. If the heavy debts which the foolish wars of Pitt had
bequeathed to the Empire had not seemed to offer a justification,
the Tory blunderers would not have forced the issue; but once it was
joined, vast numbers of Americans came to believe that the development
of their country had reached a point where it would be hampered by
further overseas regulation; that America must be free to exploit her
resources to her exclusive advantage; and that such economic freedom
would be possible only with political independence. It was the ill
luck of the ministry to present the question so concretely that the
colonial radicals were given an opportunity to awaken the latent forces
of American liberalism and turn them against English sovereignty.
A militant nationalistic psychology resulted from a widespread
propaganda, and the last ties with England were broken.
II • Argument and Propaganda
We understand the ways of propaganda today better than our fathers
understood them, and the official pronouncements of diplomats and
statesmen we have grown somewhat skeptical of. Historians of the
American Revolution have paid rather too exclusive attention to formal
speeches and state papers, forgetting that those speeches and papers
too often served the purpose of obscuring and evading the real issues.
The ten years of dreary debate preceding the clash of arms, during
which theory and precedent were examined by partisan lawyers, did
little more than serve party purposes on both sides of the Atlantic,
investing immediate interests with nationalistic or imperialistic
idealism. Honest men talked themselves into a passion, but they took
good care that their cause should appear dressed to advantage.
On the American side the argument fell into two broad divisions: an
attempt to justify the colonial position by appeal to the British
constitution, and when that failed by an appeal to the extra-legal
doctrine of natural right. To understand the obscure constitutional
wrangle, it must be recalled that important changes in English
constitutional practice had taken place since the colonies were
founded. Parliamentary sovereignty had superseded royal sovereignty,
or in other words, the sovereignty of property had superseded divine
right autocracy; and this in turn was undergoing change in the second
half of the eighteenth century--the sovereignty of landed property
was challenged by the rising capitalism. The Revolution of 1688 had
established the general principle that the state can take no property
in the form of taxes or levies without the consent of the owner, given
by himself or by his representative sitting in Parliament. But in
current practice the system of representation had become so misshapen
that a new theory had arisen to give constitutional sanction to
existing methods. Refusal to reapportion representation had resulted in
the notorious rotten-borough system, control of which boroughs was too
valuable an asset to the ruling oligarchy to be surrendered. To justify
the scandal a new theory of virtual representation was developed--a
theory upon which turned much of the early revolutionary debate. In
brief the theory asserted that as Parliament speaks for the total body
of Englishmen, it makes no practical difference who elects them, where
they live, who they are, or what interests they represent. Within the
halls of Parliament they can be trusted to think and legislate for the
nation as a whole. The essential constitutional principle requires
only that there shall be a respectable body chosen from among the
commons of England, in whose hands shall rest the custody of the purse,
and who shall serve as a check upon the royal prerogative. Such was
the parliamentary situation in 1763, and when appeal was made by the
colonials to the principle of no taxation without representation, it
was answered by appeal to the theory of virtual representation.
American constitutional practice, on the other hand, had developed in
a contrary direction. Quite as consciously as Parliament, the several
colonial legislatures rested on the principle of property rights, but
a different system of representation had developed. By easy logic a
geographical theory had emerged, by the terms of which a legislator
must be a freeman of the district rather than of the realm, that he
should hold power for a short period and frequently submit his conduct
to the scrutiny of the electors, and that a district should bear a just
per capita relation to the total population. The doctrine of virtual
representation was alien to colonial theory, although in fact it might
be applied to the large body of disfranchised non-property-holders.
The broad difference, then, in the legislative practice of the two
countries lay in the important distinction between local, numerical
representation, and a grotesque system of borough jobbing. Both systems
rested on a narrow suffrage, although the colonial basis was very
much broader. The difference was without significance so long as the
traditional relations between America and England continued; but when
Parliament proposed to extend the theory of virtual representation
to the colonies, and treat Massachusetts and Virginia as on a
constitutional footing with Birmingham and Manchester, the difference
became acute. No American colony was willing to become the pawn of
parliamentary placemen, at the mercy of parliamentary jobbery.
The debate over this vital question was involved in obscurities by
reason of the vagueness of the British constitution. If an unwritten
constitution be no other than established practice--and it is true of
the English constitution in spite of the body of principles existing in
such pronouncements as Magna Charta, the settlement of 1689, and the
Common Law--then the current practice of Parliament must be accepted as
constitutional. This was the fatal weakness of the colonial argument,
as it was the weakness of Pitt and other defenders of America in
Parliament. When Pitt exclaimed with characteristic grandiloquence,
“I come not here armed at all points with law cases and acts of
Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog-ears, to defend
the cause of liberty,” he abandoned the legal ground to appeal to the
sense of justice and right of Englishmen. But the question could not
so easily be transferred from the domain of constitutional law. For
upwards of a hundred years Parliament had been sovereign, and for the
colonials now to deny its sovereignty meant one of two things: either
to go back to the obsolete principle of divine right, or to postulate
an extra-parliamentary body of constitutional law, unknown to English
practice. A sovereignty inhering neither in King nor Parliament,
but in a super-constitution, was a conception that had been played
with by Coke in an endeavor to exalt the Common Law, and hinted at
by later Whig statesmen, but which had never established itself in
practice. The colonials recognized the dilemma and made half-hearted
attempts to evade it. John Adams and Franklin endeavored to argue
that as the colonial charters were from the crown, and antedated the
rise of Parliament, Americans owed allegiance to the King and not to
Parliament, and hence parliamentary pretentions to sovereignty over
America were only a new form of unconstitutional prerogative. But
the argument was taken seriously by neither side, and was soon put
away.[198]
It finally became clear to American leaders that if their cause were
to make headway, appeal must be made to broader principles. Their
case must rest on philosophical rather than on legal grounds. This
suffices to explain the shift from constitutionalism to abstract
rights, which marked the middle period of the debate. By 1773 it had
become evident to thoughtful observers that the cause of American
liberalism must fail, or become revolutionary in purpose and intent,
and to become such it must seek justification in extra-constitutional
principles. And this justification it discovered in the writings of
English liberals of the seventeenth century--in Sidney and Milton, and
above all in Locke. The influence of Locke had long been paramount in
English political speculation. He had been the apologist and defender
of the settlement of 1689; the principles which he expounded lay at the
base of the dynastic rights of the reigning house, and were nominally
accepted by all the parliamentary leaders. The relations between
natural rights and parliamentary sovereignty had not wholly clarified,
and in the background of English constitutional thought still lingered
a vague notion of certain natural rights above the constitution, and
limiting parliamentary statutes. Thinkers as different as Blackstone
and Camden subscribed to such doctrine, but it daily became more
tenuous in the face of a growing acceptance of unlimited parliamentary
sovereignty.[199]
In turning to Locke, therefore, the colonial debaters went back a
century and picked up the argument of liberalism as it existed before
it had been nullified by later English practice. They occupied a
position similar to that defended by him a hundred years before;
they were combating the same arbitrary rule that had brought on the
Revolution of 1688. He had laid down the basic principle of revolution
in the doctrine of certain natural rights of the subject which no state
may subvert without peril to the original compact; he had asserted
that taxation without representation constituted such subversive
tyranny; and he gave high sanction to the right and duty of resistance
to an encroaching sovereignty. The noble words, “Chains are but an
ill wearing how much soever we gild or polish them,” uttered a note
of defiance to arbitrary power which struck a responsive chord in the
breast of the colonial liberal. In short, Locke’s two _Treatises on
Civil Government_, aimed at Sir Robert Filmer’s absurd _Patriarcha_,
were turned against Parliament and became the textbook of the American
Revolution.
The ground had been well prepared. The argument of Locke went home
with such convincing force to the colonial liberal because it embodied
conclusions towards which America had long been moving. It was an
eloquent confirmation of native experience, a sober justification
of the psychology of individualism. The self-governing state had so
long been an established fact in colonial life as to have assumed the
complexion of a natural right. The political compact had taken form in
American political thought, a generation before Locke gave currency to
the theory, and Jefferson was expressing native conclusions drawn from
American experience when he argued that “governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” It is not true to assert that Jefferson was only reciting
Locke, with modifications derived from the French humanitarians. It is
nearer the truth to say that he made use of old-world philosophy to
express and justify certain native tendencies then seeking adequate
statement.
To such an experience, armed with such a philosophy, there must
come eventually the conviction that both monarchy and aristocracy
were irrational; that the ambitions of a coercive alien sovereignty