This blog has been reviewing the history of the American colonies and how that history demonstrates the influence of various trains of thought that affected how this nation’s forebears saw their situation. In retrospect, current students know that they were headed for independence from Great Britain and of the labors they endured to establish a new nation with a new formula for its governance and politics.
A summary description that this blogger finds particularly useful is provided by the historian Gordon S. Wood. That is, assisting the colonists was history. To the point,
History was the most obvious source of information, for they knew they must “judge of the future” by the past. “Happy are the men, and happy the people, who grow wise by the misfortunes of others.” The writings of classical antiquity, as Josiah Quincy told his son, were especially “elegant and instructive,” for in the histories of the ancient world they would “imbue a just hatred of tyranny and zeal for freedom.” Naturally the history of England was most important for the colonists, for, as Dickinson said, it “abounds with instances” of how a people had protected their liberties against their rulers. Mingled with their historical citations were repeated references to the natural-law writings of Enlightenment philosophers and the common-law writings of English jurists – both contributing to a more obviously rational, rather than an experiential, understanding of the nature of politics. And for those who continued to confront the world in religious terms the revelations of scripture and the mandates of covenant theology possessed a special force that scarcely contradicted but instead supplemented the knowledge about society reached through the use of history and reason.[1]
Of course, here Wood is describing Americans before being influenced by transcendentalist thought. That later view would be imported from Europe in the early nineteenth century and infuse Americans with a big dose of individualism. This would augment an individualism both frontier life and Enlightened ideas, emanating from the pens of Hobbes and Locke, bolstered.
All of this created a complex American cultural stew of seemingly opposing beliefs, but which mixed in a harmonious, national recipe. Of course, the mix would not hold and as the years elapsed, one can detect how this lack of unanimity would eventually lead to the Civil War. But that is getting ahead of the story. In the 1770s and 1780s, they felt a great deal of unity and saw beyond the incompatibilities in the ways they brought together history, rationalism, and scripture. Even the pulpit found ways to accept the objectified arguments of the Enlightenment.
The cited names by the founders stretched the gamut of known history; they utilized the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Livy, Cicero, Sidney, Harrington, and Locke among others. And, interestingly, this study did not lead the founders to reject English history, but to incorporate it with its natural law – a law that recognized the duties of individuals even in a state of nature, much less under the governance of a polity.
And that law was embedded in English history. It wasn’t that history that they, the founders, rejected, but how the current generation of English leaders were betraying that history. The taxes that colonists had no voice in enacting and the despotic reactions by the Crown – the presence of troops and other repressive measures – to which they were being subjected were done without any input by these early Americans.
They saw the current leadership, especially in the treatment of the colonies, as ignoring the English traditions of its common-law. That law, in the minds of the colonists constituted a “science” outlining the principles of governance and politics that one could, in turn, employ in devising a new constitutional framework. And that framework, as the days passed, seemed more and more a necessity so as to uphold that older constitutional tradition.
This was done not to reject the principles of the English constitution which they admired greatly, but to extract the principles they could more functionally tailor to the American realities. And one should not underestimate how they saw that the English constitution honored those laws of nature and which they respected.
While they saw their efforts as not rejecting the English constitution, but as defending it, one can more fully understand what Wood cites when he quotes the founders, “‘No Government that ever existed, was so essentially free.’ Even members of the Stamp Act Congress [a gathering of colonial leaders protesting the British stamp tax on the colonies] gloried in ‘having been born under the most perfect form of government.’”[2]
So, one can’t help questioning the use of the term “revolution” to describe what the colonists were about in their fight for independence. Perhaps the term “restoration” should be used. Be that as it may, a more granular view should be elicited from the events of the late eighteenth century. In that, a discarded descriptor should be reconsidered.
That is that both here in America and in England a division formed that one can describe as a “country-court” division. This term refers to a hostility among primarily the English population. The “country” side of the divide relevantly saw its constitution made of parts and those parts stood independently from other parts.
That is, the Commons (the regular folks) were apart from the Crown (the monarchy) and each of them was apart from Parliament, and they were apart from any political party. This level of independence among the elements of the political landscape meant that no person was dependent or beholding to another person or group within the system – each stood on its own basis of legitimate standing.
And as observers, Americans drew out various messages that they could incorporate in their efforts to honor the English constitution. They were particularly drawn to the more radical, least respected views expressed in England or, as Wood describes it, those arguments emanating from “left of the official Whig line.”[3] This blog will next look at what that meant in the colonies.
[1] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 6-7 (emphasis in the original). This seminal work was originally published in 1969.
