Chapter 11. Revolutionary Ideology

When the American colonists rebelled against rule by the British, there was as yet very little of a conscious revolutionary tradition with which they could identify and to which they could appeal. The radical aspects of the 1640s in England were little known to the people at large. What the revolutionary intellectuals were acutely aware of, however, was an ongoing decline of liberty throughout the world. Nearly everywhere, they believed, people had known only tyranny. Only a few societies had ever been able to enjoy liberty for any length of time, notably, ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, the Swiss Confederacy, the Dutch Republic, the Venetian Republic, Sweden, Denmark, pre-Norman England, and post-1688 England. In these societies, virtuous and sturdy citizens had lived the cherished simple and patriotic lives devoted to justice and individual liberty that Americans identified with freedom.[135]

But, as the American revolutionaries noted, most of these societies had subsequently lost their liberties. While ambitious and opportunistic men from without or within sought to expand their own power, the governing structure became tyrannical, and the republican virtues that had upheld the system had given way to corruption, cynicism, and venality. Thus, Athens had fallen to Sparta and later to Alexander’s Macedonian empire; the Roman Republic— whose history fascinated America political theorists, as it did the French— had degenerated into a tyrannical and blatantly corrupt empire; the Swedish people, once free, were now subjected to monarchical tyranny; Denmark’s parliamentary freedoms had been destroyed in the previous century, as the result of a corrupt nobility and a standing army; and Venice, formerly a republic, was now ruled by a cabal of despots. Only those free societies whose members had maintained their virtue and exercised continual vigilance had been able to resist this tendency toward tyranny and retain their liberties: most notably, the Swiss and the Dutch.

The other major exception to worldwide tyranny, in the eyes of early American thinkers, was Great Britain. Centuries ago, to be sure, the liberty-loving Saxons had been subjugated by the Normans under William the Conqueror, and more recently, to be sure, the Stuart kings had almost succeeded in destroying English liberties. But as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had established parliamentary sovereignty, liberty still existed in Britain, it was believed; nor was this history lost on English Whig intellectuals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who extolled the liberties that the English system still preserved. Men of independent property enjoyed freedoms unparalleled elsewhere on earth, and the key to preserving them, so the Whig writers maintained, was Britain’s unique constitution—unwritten and organic—embodied in the traditions of its monarchy and Parliament. Both institutions existed in equilibrium as a result of what were later called “checks and balances” that prevented the encroachment by one branch of government on another, which John Locke grounded in natural rights and a social contract. The American intellectuals believed that as Englishmen (and they were mainly men) they shared in this unique legacy, and accordingly—at least before the prerevolutionary decade— they viewed the English system as a paragon of lasting personal freedom.

But in the 1720s a number of oppositional intellectuals in England realized that this system, so extolled by earlier Whig intellectuals like Locke, was a sham. The equilibrium of court and Parliament within the English system had gone awry. The king and his ministers were becoming all too powerful and were threatening to usurp the privileges of Parliament. The Crown’s ministers had corrupted members of Parliament through patronage and favors; standing armies had been established by the king and remained under his control, rather than Parliament’s; and the steady usurpation of power by the monarchy threatened to disrupt the institutional balance that had allowed England’s system to preserve individual liberties.

The coffeehouse radicals and the opposition politicians who made these criticisms in 1720s England called themselves the Independent or True Whigs, as opposed to the false Whigs who had betrayed the Glorious Revolution. They revived the “Country” critique of the “Court” that had existed in the decades before the English Revolution, and their primary polemicists, pamphleteers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, invoked the ideals of the Glorious Revolution and the writings of Locke, Harrington, and others against the present corruption of English politics and society. Writing with verve and color in The Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, these polemicists inveighed against the manipulative and corrupting encroachments of Walpole’s ministry, emphasizing the dangers that a powerful government posed. Again, they popularized ideas of natural right, the social contract, and England’s constitution, as these had been expounded by Locke, Sidney, Neville, and especially the republican James Harrington, but this time, in the service of opposition to the status quo rather than to its celebration.

The polemicists of the 1720s did more than merely uphold the aims of the Glorious Revolution; their writings were often overtly libertarian. They maintained that government as such was intrinsically hostile to human liberty, existing only because people whose needs it served allowed it to; if it trespassed beyond its proper limits and became tyrannical, it not only could be but should be overthrown. Whether knowingly or not, their program revived the spirit of the more radical Leveler manifestos by insisting that government was necessarily accountable to the sovereign people if it was not to slip into tyranny. The pamphleteers even raised old Leveler demands for adult manhood suffrage, the binding of representatives to their constituencies, freedom of the press, and complete religious tolerance.

Surprisingly, these ideas had relatively little political impact in the England to which they were addressed, but in the American colonies their influence was enormous. The colonists thought that the trend of the British Empire was no longer toward the preservation of freedom in America but rather toward the centralization of all British territories under the authority of a Parliament controlled by the Crown. Like the English opposition writers of the 1720s, they held that the royal government was not preserving but denying them the “rights of Englishmen.” Accordingly, when Britain tried to impose taxes and tariffs on Americans, legitimating them in a seemingly representative body, Parliament, but one in which Americans had no representation, such actions were equivalent to denying the Americans their own liberty-preserving political institutions, such as the town meetings of New England and the colonial legislatures south of the Hudson alike. The Americans were outraged that the ranks of the royal administration, particularly customs commissions, were being expanded, creating the possibility for more of the British-style patronage and corruption against which Trenchard and Gordon had inveighed. And, in fact, some of the colonial governors, especially Hutchinson of Massachusetts, seemed intent on developing a large patronage machine that was being filled with people who, as Benjamin Franklin explained, were

generally strangers to the provinces they are sent to govern, have no estate, natural connection, or relation there to give them an affection for the country... they come only to make money as fast as they can; are sometimes men of vicious characters and broken fortunes, sent by a minister merely to get them out of the way.[136]

Like the English True Whigs, Americans regarded the royal power as selfaggrandizing, seeking to expand itself at their expense. “The crown will take advantage of every opportunity of extending its prerogative in opposition to the privileges of the people,” wrote James Wilson of Pennsylvania, which destroyed their virtue since “it is the interest of those who have pensions or offices at will from the crown to concur in all its measures.”[137] The attempt by Parliament in 1772 to appoint colonial judges, a practice that had been disallowed in England since 1701, was a step that Americans saw as particularly aggrandizing and a tyrannical subversion of the English constitution on their side of the ocean. Clearly, the powerful in Britain were conspiring to overthrow liberty-preserving institutions in America; indeed, it was feared, priests would be imposed upon America and the separate colonial legislatures would be eliminated. This is precisely the way in which many Americans viewed the Quebec Act: as a regression to “popery” and absolutism.

Accordingly, the English libertarian tracts, especially Cato’s Letters, were republished over and over as pamphlets and in colonial newspapers for what seemed like a public of insatiable readers. To Americans, according to Bernard Bailyn, “the writings of Trenchard and Gordon ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced.”[138] These writings seemed almost tailored to the way the colonists conceived of their lives and their destinies. Americans, if only in theory, assumed that theirs was a land based on independent farmsteads, relatively representative legislatures, and a polity made up of free, virtuous yeoman farmers who conformed to radical Whig ideas of a free polity. Indeed, a good deal of Enlightenment thought supported the notion that America was in effect purer and freer than England, the apotheosis of “the rights of Englishmen,” and more generally an enclave of virtue and liberty. Both Voltaire and Diderot viewed America as the distillation of all that was good in England, and many Americans were only too glad to oblige them in this image. John Adams voiced the same attitude in 1765 when he maintained:

The liberties of mankind and the glory of human nature is in (Americans’] keeping. America was designed by Providence for the theater on which man was to make his true figures, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace.[139]

The American revolutionary intellectuals thus viewed their battle as a struggle for liberty as such, and their colonies as the crucial holdout against the worldwide demise of freedom. It was no small matter that Thomas Paine, in his electrifying pamphlet Common Sense, assigned a quasi-millenarian goal to the American Revolution:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa long expelled her—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.[140]

In this perception, all that stood between liberty and tyranny was vigilance, as the cases of the virtuous Swiss and Dutch seemed to demonstrate.

In fact, the American analysis of the institutional sources of their liberty was based on a fallacy. The colonists had depended much less on the existing English constitution for the preservation of their liberties than on the “benign neglect” of the colonies by the royal administration over past generations. Before 1760, the Crown and Parliament had scarcely exercised their powers over the colonies, with the result that the colonists had become accustomed to a system in which they essentially governed themselves. In the absence of strict administration from London, the town meetings and the colonial assemblies exercised real power in most important areas of colonial life. Thus, Parliament’s legal powers to approve or reject bills passed by colonial legislatures and decisions by colonial courts, to make appointments, to regulate trade, and the like, were less integral to daily life, even when they had been exercised before 1760.

It had in fact been local, common law courts that administered justice in the colonies;... And it had in fact been local bodies—towns and counties in the Erst instance, ultimately the provincial Assemblies—that laid down the rules for daily life; rules concerning the production and distribution of wealth, personal conduct, the worship of God—most of the ways in which people deal with the world, animate and inanimate about them. And these same bodies had been the ones accustomed to tax. Moneys had of course been collected by the home authorities; but they had been fees, dues, and rents—charges, for the most part, incidental to the regulation of overseas trade—not taxes. The power of taxing, from the earliest years of settlement, had been exercised by the representative Assemblies of the various colonies, and exercised without competition—indeed with encouragement—from England. The condition of British America by the end of the Seven Years’ War was therefore anomalous: extreme decentralization of authority within an empire presumably ruled by a single, absolute, undivided sovereign.[141]

Under such circumstances, the English constitution was scarcely relevant to American liberties, and when they began their revolt against Britain the Americans found that the social and political order that they were constructing exhibited relatively little resemblance to the much-apotheosized Glorious Revolution. Whether knowingly or not, they were reviving the demands that the Levelers had made in their very first Agreement of the People : sovereignty of the people, if only by developing and enlarging the scope of institutions they had established under the neglect of the British authorities across the Atlantic.

PAINE’S COMMON SENSE

Nevertheless, at the time when hostilities broke out between the colonies and Britain, many patriots remained devout monarchists who thought they were merely trying to rectify abuses of power on the part of a flawed king and his ministers—even as George III was declaring them “rebels” and obliging them to fight their English cousins in red coats. The armed conflict went beyond mere skirmishes at the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually of Breed’s Hill) on the outskirts of Boston on June 17,1775—the first organized encounter of British regulars with New England militiamen on a large scale. The British victory was a pyrrhic one: more than a thousand dead and 2,200 wounded fell against entrenched Americans, who lost only 441 out of an estimated 3,200. In selecting George Washington to command the 15,000 militia who formed the united colonial forces, the Continental Congress showed unerring judgment: the wooden image that Americans commonly hold today of this gallant man does him little justice. Washington commanded a force of his own during the French and Indian War, during which time he exhibited exceptional qualities as a military strategist. He was a man of immense personal courage in combat situations and a devoted leader of his troops. In the early period of the war the Continental Army—that is, the army in which Americans enlisted as regulars— and local militias tried to outwit rather than recklessly confront the relatively sluggish but well-trained, well-equipped, and sizable army of British regulars. Once the colonial forces were routed in the New York City area—which remained in British hands until the end of the war—Washington’s tactics alternated between retreats designed to preserve his small army from total destruction and limited surprise attacks that threw the British commander, General William Howe, off balance.

After these months of armed conflict, with bloody bodies left on battlefields, increasing numbers of American colonists began to abandon any allegiance to the monarchy. Many who had continued to favor America’s association with Britain lived in the vain hope that the mother country would maintain a basic respect and affection for its colonies—a hope that was finally shattered by the news that the Crown had hired 20,000 Hessian mercenaries to fight against its own colonial subjects. So devastating to loyalist arguments was the deployment of foreign mercenaries that even many committed monarchists were outraged, and for many loyal colonists the bond between ruler and subject was revealed as a sham.

In January 1776, Tom Paine’s stirring pamphlet Common Seme dearly formulated the still inchoate but increasingly hostile sentiments of the colonials into a flat rejection of the notion that the English constitution, with its king and Parliament, could conform to American conceptions of liberty. Contrary to more than a century of English Whig thought, Paine argued, the balance of king and Parliament constituted an outright threat to colonial freedom. Not only did Americans lack any representation in Parliament, but they could not feasibly obtain such representation in a body that met thousands of miles away. To restore a balance in their relations with Britain was chimerical, Paine argued; bluntly, Americans had to sever their ties with England and independently follow their own destiny.

Contrary to the commonly held view that Common Sense merely inspired the patriot party to demand independence, Paine’s pamphlet was actually a spirited argument for republicanism as such. “The nearer any government approaches to a republic the less business there is for a king,” he militantly declared.[142] And it was not the king alone but the English system as such that was fatally flawed—“the so much boasted constitution of England,” as Paine called it—which consists merely of two tyrannies, “monarchical tyranny in the person of the King ... [and] aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers,” a system that merely relies on the oligarchical House of Commons to create the illusion of true representation. The idea “that the constitution is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other,” Paine wrote, “is farcical.”[143]

Tyranny was endemic to kings, argued Paine; they naturally tended to expand their own power. Grasping and tenacious, restless and insatiable, monarchical power invariably corrupted virtue and destroyed liberty. Like the Leveler Thomas Rainborough, who had invoked the natural rights of the individual in the Putney Debates almost a century and a half earlier, Paine too invoked natural rights in formulating his case against monarchy: “the exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature.” Further: “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others.”[144] Paine left no argument for monarchy unanswered, no claim to scriptural authority unrefined. “For monarchy in every instance is the popery of government,” he warned, associating kingship with the widely regarded enemy of liberty, the Catholic Church.[145]

Fortunately, Paine’s argument continued, a king is unnecessary to political systems; indeed, monarchy “is a political superfluity.” Nor is a balance of forces or “checks and balances” necessary to preserve liberties. In fact, he continued, the source of the liberty-preserving elements of the English constitution has been misidentified: the liberties of England, such as they are, are all “wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government.”[146] There is no reason for Americans to try to recapitulate the English system in America, since “it is the republican and not the monarchical part of the constitution which Englishmen glory in, viz. the liberty of choosing a house of commons from out of their own body.”[147] Americans should cast off the ancient traditions of England’s corrupt system and create a new political order based not on English tradition but on natural rights, which alone are the true bases of human liberty. As the radical English Whigs had previously done and as French revolutionaries would do only a few years later, he invoked “republican virtue” as the moral basis of the new system. “It is easy to see,” he wrote, “that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.”[148]

Independent America, Paine argued, should adopt the republic as their form of government—a body of representatives without either a king or an aristocracy. Falling back on the long experience of the colonies with written colonial charters, which had often protected them from British interference, Paine called upon the thirteen new states to adopt constitutions that institutionalized unicameral assemblies—a single house of parliament—whose members would be elected annually, based on a relatively equal suffrage, and presided over by an elected president. For the colonies as a whole, Paine raised the cry for a “Continental Charter, or Charter of the United Colonies” that would “securje] freedom and property to all men.” He offered his own plan for a republican constitution, again with a large unicameral assembly, whose members (“at least 390”) were to be elected annually by a broad suffrage. The presiding officer, the president, Paine argued, should be chosen by lot and rotation by the Congress from among the delegates of the states.

Not all patriots, to be sure, agreed with Paine’s call for the unicameral legislature nor with his rejection of the “checks and balances” of the English constitution. Paine’s conception of republican government, complained John Adams, “was so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.”[149] Popular assemblies, Adams felt, were too changeable, too subject to hasty judgments, and too amenable to demagogery to lend stability to a political and social order. Adams, in his own Thoughts on Government, which appeared only a few months after Common Sense and apparently in response to it, presented a model of republican government that recapitulated the equilibrium of the English constitution, albeit without the king and the aristocracy: there would be two houses in the legislature, Adams prescribed, and an executive that could veto bills passed by the legislature, as well as an independent judiciary.

Although American constitutionalists were to eventually accept Adams’s views in his Thoughts on Government, it was Paine’s pamphlet that fired the mood of the revolutionaries. With blistering polemical ardor and taut rationality, Common Sense electrified the patriot movement, and more than any single work at the time it led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Following its publication. General Washington ceased toasting the king’s health at the nightly mess of his officers. As he noted in a letter of January 31,1776, “the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contained in the pamphlet Common Sense” among other arguments, “will not leave members at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.”[150] Within a week or two, the Virginia aristocrat and military commander had been converted from a royalist to a republican, and he ordered his officers to read the pamphlet to their troops.

The debate over the proper form of government, especially as articulated by Paine and Adams, reached a peak of intensity once the American provinces no longer considered themselves subjects of the king, and it became their task to write constitutions for themselves as independent states. “Up and down the still sparsely settled coast of British North America,” writes Bailyn,

groups of men—intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant—gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments... , Everywhere there were discussions of the ideal nature of government; everywhere principles of politics were examined, institutions weighed, and practices considered. And these debates ... were direct continuations of the discussions that had preceded Independence.[151]

Indeed, in 1776 alone, eight states drafted and adopted constitutions establishing their independence from the Crown.

On June 12,1776, the famous Virginia Bill of Rights appeared, clarifying what Americans were fighting for. Written by George Mason, the Virginia bill stated the cherished liberties of citizens that had always been won by countless struggles throughout English history, but unlike later bills of rights of which it was to be the progenitor, the Virginia bill was also presented as a “basis and foundation of government.” “All power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people,” the bill declared in sweeping prose; “magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.” Its articles asserted the right to “alter” and “abolish” government “in such a manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal,” with “frequent certain and regular elections” (which at this time meant annual ones). It upheld suffrage for “all men having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to the community” (a property qualification), and proclaimed the judicial right of all accused persons to confront their accusers in open courts in the course of a “speedy trial by an impartial jury of [their] own vicinage,” prohibiting excessive bail, “cruel and unusual punishment,” and general warrants such as writs of assistance. Finally, the bill affirmed freedom of the press as “one of the great bulwarks of liberty,” and it favored a militia as against a standing army that “in times of peace should be avoided as dangerous to liberty.” This sweeping document eliminated all restraints on religious liberty and endowed all men with “the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”[152] It may be well to note that most of these rights and freedoms would have been considered treasonable in the rest of the world at that time.

INDEPENDENCE

The rapid advance from a conciliatory attitude toward the king to one of open hostility and disavowal is remarkable, reflecting the fact that revolutions telescope events that ordinarily take generations, even centuries, into a single year or less. By the early months of 1776, patriot sentiment throughout the colonies was so inflamed that John Adams, at the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, could write: “By every Post and every day, Independence rolls in on us like a torrent.”[153] Not that the colonies were undivided; in Rhode Island the backcountry was the driving force toward independence, for example, but Newport and Narragansett Counties in the wealthy southern part of the state remained loyal, while the agrarian north, which was in control of the provincial government, openly declared the colony’s independence.

Moreover, many delegates to the Continental Congress were hesitant about supporting separation from the mother country. In the spring of 1776, the defenders of proprietary interests in Pennsylvania and delegates from many southern colonies were shocked by Paine’s demands, and at the Congress itself they maintained a particular wariness of the New Englanders, with their town meeting “mob rule” democracy and their apparent desire to extend it to the other colonies. The delegates from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York— colonies where wealthy conservative interests were still in power—had been specifically instructed to vote against independence if it was raised. Nor would delegates from these colonies vote for independence until the radicals at home turned to outright revolutionary actions and established popular governmental institutions.

Still, Paine’s words profoundly influenced the committee that the Second Continental Congress appointed in mid-June 1776 to prepare the Declaration of Independence. The committee included Sam Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York and, of course, Thomas Jefferson, who was asked by his co-members to draft the Declaration with which his name is famously associated. The document was a sweeping statement of the basic concepts of liberty that had been percolating through the colonies from the inception of their struggle:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Many of the “self-evident truths” of which Jefferson wrote had their immediate roots in the treatises of John Locke: notably, that men as individuals (and women no less, we would interject today) have inalienable natural rights that cannot be abridged; that these rights stem from the very natural order of things; and that government exists by the consent of the governed and has no authority except what the people grant to it. Many of these ideas have clear predecessors in the writings of the Levelers, although at the time of the English Revolution they were hardly seen as “self-evident.” If not by design, the authors repeatedly express views, even statements, in the Declaration that parallel early Leveler assertions going back to the 1640s. “By natural birth,” Richard Overton had asserted, “all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty, and freedom.”[154] Similarly, “by nature,” John Lilburne had written, they are “all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.”[155] And again: “We are resolved upon our natural rights and freedoms,” Overton wrote.[156] “The only and sole legislative law-making power is originally inherent in the people,” Lilburne affirmed, “and derivatively in their commissions chosen by themselves by common consent and no other.”[157] “So ought the whole nation to be free therein even to alter and change the public form,” William Walwyn asserted, “as may best stand with the safety and freedom of the people.”[158]

By contrast, it is worth adding, the constitution that John Locke himself had prepared for his patron’s newly acquired colony of Carolina in the late seventeenth century was a curious regression to feudal privilege and hierarchy. Yet Locke’s theoretical ideas bear implications that are far in advance of previous thinking on social contract and natural law ideas. Although the notion of equal natural rights had been long in the making, Locke’s Second Treatise turned it into a rational idea by emphasizing that men by their own labor refashion nature, in a sense, when they invest their labor to meet their own needs and aims. That is to say, their labor recreates nature as a domain of individual rights. Nature, in effect, is not merely an original condition of human equality; it is a realm permeated by property rights, formulated by human activity, and recreated by work and intelligence.

By Locke’s time, radical statesmen had indissolubly wedded property to natural law; human labor, they argued, had conferred “natural rights” upon the individual that were beyond the reach of the state, still less of arbitrary rulers.

The fact that nearly all the great declarations promulgated by republican revolutions in the eighteenth century wedded property to natural rights or at least swept property rights into their list of inalienable rights—including their right to the liberty of their own bodies—was not necessarily due to self-interest or class interest, important as these interests were to men of property. Rather, by virtue of the fact that property was acquired through labor in reworking nature, Locke in effect shifted the priority Hobbes had given to the state over the individual to individual property as a major source of natural rights, thereby diminishing its authority over the people.

Property, in turn, conferred major liberties on the citizen. It gave him the material independence to act as a free agent, beholden to no one and nothing other than his own reason and conscience. Unlike the dependent serf of the feudal system, who had owed produce and service to his lord in exchange for military protection and the use of the lord’s land, the independent citizen in the republic owned his own land, provided for his family with it, and bore arms to defend his own land and his community. And unlike servants and others who had no property and hence could be manipulated by their masters, the propertied man could be guided by his own rational judgments, free of external coercion or fears of material want. He was not a client but a citizen, or at least potentially so. Nor was he a “drifter,” a member of the “mobility” or “mob,” but rather a well-rooted member of a given community who had a social stake in its welfare. He had lasting friends, neighbors, material interests, and responsibilities, and hence he could be counted upon to be concerned with the community’s best interests as well as his own.

Bourgeois as these notions seem to us today, they date back to ancient times and can be found in the works of Aristotle. Doubtless, had John Locke himself attended the Putney Debates, he would have sided with Henry Ireton when Cromwell’s son-in-law insisted that property was the prerequisite for political rights. But Locke’s ideas could be used, by implication at least, by Thomas Rainborough, who defended universal suffrage on the basis of natural rights and was willing to extend citizenship even to the poorest Englishman who was not a servant. Ireton had argued to considerable effect that a social order based on natural rights would not only give everyone the vote but could be used by the propertyless to claim a right to property. Locke had yet to write the Second Treatise when the Putney Debates were under way, and Rainborough had no effective rebuttal to Ireton’s argument. Yet Locke’s theories wresting private property from nature through one’s labor could have been used by Rainborough to counter Ireton, assuming that he was prepared to assert the “right” of all men to own property—an issue that was to emerge two decades later among the radical Jacobins, at least by implication, in the famous Ventdse laws of 1794.

Unknown in the 1640s, the nonbourgeois aspects of Locke’s theories were very much in the air a century and a half later. To yeoman farmers of limited means, their world of property was a world of familial husbandry; American farmers, in fact, tended to cultivate only as much land as they needed to meet their immediate needs. One might farm more land if one lived close to the larger artisanal and commercial towns along the Atlantic seaboard and riverways, where a growing market economy tended to seduce the farmer into commercial agriculture. But the closer yeoman farmers came to the frontier, the less this condition prevailed, as we shall see in our discussion of the Shaysites. Here the view of property as a natural right, carved out of the wilderness by virtue of one’s own physical labor, seemed only too obvious, and a Lockean argument could be used as effectively against the merchants of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, to whom the farmers were indebted, as it could against the king. Nor did the small proprietors of America ever quite lose sight of the view that attempts to seize their farmsteads and possessions for unpaid debts were a violation of their “natural rights,” and from the 1770s until as late as the 1930s they took up arms to keep merchants and bankers from dispossessing them from land that they or their ancestors had wrested from “nature” by virtue of their own labor. The notion that property was sacred was thus highly elastic: it could be used as effectively by precapitalist strata to hold on to their property as it could by capitalist strata to expand their holdings.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence—which was no less a summons to the American people to take up arms against the monarchy than a claim to independence—were mainly lawyers, although quite a few had thriving businesses and perhaps fewer had thriving plantations of their own. The well-to-do merchant class, the nearest thing the Americans had to an authentic bourgeoisie, constituted only a minority of the signers, and the extent to which they were representative of their class is questionable, despite efforts to characterize the Revolution as “bourgeois.” In a sense the signers reflected the interests of a broad middle class, as yet undefined, and even of a “bourgeoisie” in the sense of burgesses who were not strictly capitalistic. They belonged to a world that was still mixed economically, in which “property” included a man’s life, social status, liberties, and personal esteem as well as his material holdings. Should one add to this list one’s responsibility to the community, the description is more Hellenic than capitalistic and in some respects more public than privatistic.

Rooted in natural law, the Declaration of Independence stands apart from most revolutionary declarations of the eighteenth century in its demand that the “unalienable rights” include life, liberty, and the “pursuit of happiness,” rather than property, as the French Declaration of Human Rights would announce thirteen years later. Nearly all the proclamatory literature of the era used “life, liberty, and property” as a definition of rights and freedom. Jefferson, who drafted the document, was hardly indifferent to the rights of property, to be sure; indeed, he upheld it as a source of meaning to natural law doctrines, and it is he who is most clearly identified in the early history of the United States with the political demands and interests of the independent farmer-proprietor. Whatever Jefferson himself may have meant by the word happiness, his use of it added a utopian, indeed transcendental dimension to ideas of rights and freedom. It conveyed the vision that the revolution was an ethical and humanistic movement, not merely a material one or a “tax revolt” or commercial adventure by merchants and planters who wished to have greater freedom of trade.

But the Declaration is not without a major contradiction: although it speaks almost lyrically of humanity’s natural rights, it takes no note whatever that one in five people in America were black slaves, let alone Indians who were treated as aliens in their own land, and women who were the legal equivalent of juveniles. Particularly in the light of the many American denunciations of British rule as “slavery,” Jefferson was acutely aware of the paradox created by the existence of chattel slavery in the colonies. Among the grievances he listed against the king in the original draft of the Declaration was the charge that “he has waged a cruel war against human nature itself... in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere” and kept an “open market where MEN could be bought and sold.” This clause in the Declaration was deleted, however, to satisfy objections from delegates from southern states and Yankee slave-traders from New England.

What makes the Declaration extraordinary is the fact that it was a proclamation directed to the entire world. To cite its opening lines, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” obliges the American revolutionaries to “declare the causes that impel them to separation.” The Declaration explicitly addresses itself to humanity and to public “opinion”; the Americans who signed this remarkable document were patently declaring their cause to the world, a precedent that all later major revolutions would follow, with its implied appeal to solidarity among all people and with its implied application of inalienable natural rights not only to the English and Americans but to everyone whom its words could reach. Like the Enlightenment itself, it was a clearly universalistic declaration that appealed to people as a whole who are free or live in trammels of political repression, avowing that the American Revolution was oriented toward the world and concerned with the existence of oppression as such.

The Revolution proved that a free people could create remarkably effective institutions at the very base of their society, institutions that were ultimately far more effective than the bureaucracy of the English monarchy. The Declaration brought this reality to the foreground such as no public document had done before. Where the Levelers had the New Model Army and an easily fragmented political network as an institutional base, the Americans had a society and a body politic. George III had essentially lost the colonies once British troops were no longer needed to protect them from the French and Indians in 1760. The Declaration took this fact for granted when it cited many of his royal prerogatives as violations of colonial sovereignty: it described his monarchical right to veto laws and suspend legislatures as the abuses of an invading tyrant, not as the exercise of legitimate royal authority by eighteenth-century standards. It is no wonder, then, that a democratic spirit inspired many ordinary patriots after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Thereafter, revolutionaries used not only Tory and loyalist as epithets for their opponents, but with increasing frequency royalist.