Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
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