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.
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