This posting will be
dedicated to conduct some housekeeping.
As indicated in the last one, this posting will begin an analysis of the
Whig Party’s history. The main question
asked of that history will be how it, as a political entity, supported or undermined
federalist values. Since one cannot look
into people’s minds or hearts, one is left predominately to know what the party
promoted through its rhetoric and through the policies it proposed and, when in
power, instituted.
But
as with most of history, judgements cannot be rendered one way or the other. They instead fall in degrees, leaning one way
or another. The same here; the various
developments of that party’s history can be judged whether the acts of those
partisans were very federal, a bit so, or not at all. Oh, there is one more degree, they could have
acted against being federal. Perhaps, to
appreciate this approach of evaluating historical movements or other sets of
events, an example of such an analysis would be helpful.
The
historian Allen C. Guelzo provides such an example. Actually, this example could have been part of
this blog’s review of the colonial history it reported in the past. The aim of that review was to describe how
the colonial years steered the American development down a federalist path. For example, it described how the Puritanical
beliefs of those early colonialists set the stage for covenantal/compact-al understanding
of how a polity should be established.
That, of course, was judged to be federalist development. But as already alluded to, this was but one nudge
toward a federalist result.
Here’s
another. Guelzo makes a telling
distinction among how the Spanish, the French, and the English went about
establishing colonies or overseas possessions.[1] To begin with, all three saw the efforts as
money-making enterprises, but the Spanish and the French had a more direct
control over what happened in the new lands.
In those cases, the respective monarchs took ownership of what was
claimed under the king’s name. The
monarch held a good bit of control by directly naming the governors and
viceroys who, in turn, governed those areas.
By
and large, the king exerted quite of bit of interest since profits were to be had
from those far off areas. But for the
British – and also the Dutch – a different story unfolded. There, the monarch did not have direct
control, but a franchise system was established. And for a variety of reasons – mismanagement,
undercapitalization, etc. – in all of the various colonies, those business
arrangements proved to be failures. And
that resulted in the Americans being allowed to manage their own affairs.
In
all, the colonies were mostly on their own, and this independence was in place in
a relatively short time, that is, within fifty years from the first settlement
in Virginia began. For the British, that
is the Imperial Government in London, this was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it laid claim to the vast
land area in North America along the Atlantic seacoast, without spending any
money to defend it. Colonials were
expected to provide for their own defense.
But this hands-off policy would have its consequences.
Before
the Virginia Company, the initial chartered entity meant to profit from that
colony, came to a formal end, the settlers of that colony already organized
themselves to establish the House of Burgesses.
This, not-so-legal legislature provided the necessary “rules of the game”
for the colony to function. That was established
in 1624, only seventeen years after the colony was first settled. It levied taxes and set limits on the
colonial governor. And the London
authorities, during these years, let its colonies do what they wished – it was
cheaper that way. After all, there was
an ocean in the way.
But
this neglect led to a different sort of legislative body in the American
colonies than what one found in the British Parliament. Parliament basically represented few
Britons. Its House of Lords was set up
to protect the nobility or the remnants of the feudal system that used to prevail
in Britain. The House of Commons
represented the successful business class.
Estimates have it that 40 percent of the nation’s wealth was owned by
the top 1 percent of the population. And
that wealth rested on the fact that these elites owned 70 percent of the land. Consequently, the politics of that nation did
not involve the bulk of its population.
Not
so in America, there, partly due to cheap land, two-thirds of the population
owned 60 percent of the land. Colonial
elites – its gentry – owned 30 percent.
So, while the elites were elites, they were tempered by a sufficiently
empowered non-elite. After all, when
seeking either positions of power or seeking the passage of some policy
proposal, the rich had to cater or convince the lower class of the prudence of
what was being proposed.
And those of the lower class were mostly
made up of independent, small farmers with what one can imagine, definite views
of good and bad, right or wrong. And key
was this notion of independence from the rich in their own colony or the rich
or imperial powers of Britain. What that
meant was those royal governors, though they had significant levels of power (e.g.,
they appointed judges), they encountered meaningful restraints. Always conscious of a potential crowd to
voice some objection to their officiating, they thought twice before offending
them.
How bad could this popularism get? “In 1736, unhappy Bostonians gathered at
midnight and demolished the town marketplace as a protest against the
construction of the marketplace by the town selectmen as a means of regulating
public food sales.”[2] That was but one case of such uprisings. By the time of the Revolutionary War, tar and
feathering incidences became common enough.[3] The common folk were a definite political
force in the American scene – sometimes not exemplifying justified reasons for
their reactions nor for the modes of reaction they were disposed to employ.
The point was that the British had to
deal with a more united people – within the various colonies – in which each population
felt it had a stake in what transpired with its “government,” its colony, and its
immediate community. One senses from
Guelzo a true sense of “being in it together.”
That is, these early Americans, in part due to these developments, felt
the compact-al relationship they had created.
So, the reader can guess how this
development ranks in this writer’s judgement about how federated it is. It definitely supported, quite vigorously, a
cultural partnership, although it could exhibit profound animosities among the
colonialists more from a sense of disappointment or judging others not meeting
their responsibilities to uphold the common good. Were there incidents of selfishness or other
self-centered motivations? Of course
there were. But the general orientation
was one in which all were in this struggle together.
So, in terms of what is coming up in
this blog, this blogger will look at the various developments the Whig Party timeline
highlighted and apply the above graded judgements as to how federal the
developments were. Again, an event will be
judged as to whether it describes a supportive, assumed, irrelevant, or contradictory
turn in establishing or maintaining a federalist cultural bias. The overall hypothesis is that the events in
total supported a federalist bent or at least did not counter that construct’s
values.
[1]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– transcript books – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).
[3] Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York, NY: Perennial, 2002). To be clear, Raphael does not present evidence of a federalist cultural bent. If anything, his book is a pro-critical view.
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