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