As I continue my learning about 1776 and the American Revolution in the year of its 250th anniversary, I reached this classic of the subject. In addition to The Ideological Origins I was interested in reading Pamphlets of the American Revolution, Bailyn's earlier work that led to writing this one. However, I learned that there is only really one edition and no digital copies readily available, so I settled for this book. I am glad I did, because it was fantastic. But in addition to reading Ideological Origins, I read some of those pamphlets:
- A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers - Jonathan Mayhew - 1750
- The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved - James Otis - 1763
- The Rights of the Colonies Examined - Stephen Hopkins - 1764
- Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament - Daniel Dulany - 1765
- Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania - Jonathan Dickinson - 1767-68
These pamphlets were an amazing primer into Revolutionary thought. I will admit that they were hard reads and I missed a lot from them. In particular, I thought the James Otis pamphlet was interesting, but I didn't really get Otis' sheer importance until I read Ideological Origins. Now I see how important it is that Otis and others conceived of a source of power not in the King or in Parliament, but in the People, who possess inalienable natural rights, that no man can be justified in taking away. This originates in the unwritten English constitution, but for the Americans, goes much further. I was more focused in reading the pamphlets on the grievances that the Americans had for the English based out of the French and Indian War, but if I read these again, I would focus more on the ideological issues that Bailyn talks about.
Otis stands out as the best writer of the pamphleteers, probably followed by Dickinson. Otis is clear in his stance that Parliament cannot rule absolutely: "The parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5." Otis represents an early American exceptionalism and superiority complex: "The province of the Massachusetts, I believe, has expanded more men and money in war since the year 1620, when a few families first landed at Plymouth, in proportion to their ability, than the three Kingdoms together." Hopkins is also particularly clear in expressing the danger that colonists foresaw. During the French and Indian War, colonists became aware of the massive power England and Parliament exerted over them, and how a standing army could arrive and take control of the colonies so easily. In fact, the result of the war was that the colonists realized France could pose no threat, being decisively defeated, and now the greatest threat to their liberty came from their own government, which was stationing a standing army in the colonies.
The Americans were not complaining that their rights were taken, but that their rights were treated as privileges granted by the Parliament, which could be taken at the prerogative of parliament. It meant that the 17th century had placed an absolute legislature in the role of an absolute monarch. This was most apparent in the intersection of taxation on mercantile monopolies. England would force the colonists to buy certain products only from England, rather than France or Spain. This created uproar when England raised the tax on those products, essentially unilaterally raising the price when no competition was allowed to exist. Even if not a deathblow to the economy, colonists saw this for the tyrannical overreach that it was.
The pamphlets themselves were important as a medium for the messages that inspired the Revolution, and their physical properties influenced the ideas that were contained in them. The pamphlet emerged in the 16th century and was a one-man show, possible for a man to write in a day or two and to print just as quickly. It is short and unbound, not requiring the lengthier publication process of a book, and usually pamphlets were considered "lowbrow." Pamphlets were also somewhat flexible in size, being possible to fold into ten or fifty pages, containing between 5,000 and 25,000 words. The revolutionary pamphleteer favored a length in the middle of that range, long enough for a polemic but short enought to be read quickly and passed on to the next reader.
Ideological Origins is mainly a work of intellectual unification of the ideas of the pamphleteers of the 1760s and 1770s, in which Bailyn identifies and analyzes how these pamphlets influenced one another to form a somewhat coherent, although not a dogmatic, ideology that catalyzed the Revolution. For one, the pamphleteers drew on the same sources. Obvious points of influence include the Bible and the Roman Republic, but there were less obvious, more contemporary events arising out of states that we would not consider democracies today--but they were liberal. Denmark, apparently, had transitioned from a liberal power-sharing arrangement between the king and the nobility to a system in which the king was absolute. Poland was a more democratic state that had fallen into dysfunction. Conspiracy theories penetrated all levels of society between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Colonists were concerned about what the British had done, but were more concerned about what the British would be doing. As Baylin writes, laws like the Stamp Act were not considered evil in themselves, but as harbingers of greater evils to come.
The high point of the book comes in Part V: Transformation, which features three chapters on Representation and Consent, Constitution and Rights, and Sovereignty. Part VI: The Contagion of Liberty also forms the meat of the book. Starting with Representation and Consent, I learned something I had never heard before, which is that in medieval England, the earliest form of representation in Parliament was a trustee-based system in which the Parliament that existed until the fifteenth century was made up of local men whose business ended with their constituency, which had given each one specific instructions on how to vote and lobby. These men were basically attorneys for their electors, who would seek redress from the king and were authorized to grant specific amounts of financial aid to the king. These men were tightly bound to their constituency: they were not national delegates expected to vote in the best interests of the country as a whole, but to narrowly exact the best deal for the propertied men that essentially hired them to go to London. They were instructed minutely on their powers. But as Parliament transformed into a system of delegates of all the commons, for one assembly, one interest, and one nation, colonists reproduced the older English institution "in miniature." Moreover, like their medieval forebears, Americans lived similarly to autonomous medieval towns in the wilderness, far from central government. They felt that they were the benefactors of the central government, not the beneficiaries of it, and did not identify their interest with the central government's interest. It was required, in Massachusetts first, and then elsewhere, that representatives be residents of and property owners in, the places for which they acted as representatives. The upshot is that colonists valued their representation in their state assemblies than they did their "virtual representation" in Parliament by delegates whom they did not elect.
Another huge question that men like Otis were dealing with was what it meant to have a "constitution," and whether that constitution, or anything for that matter, could be a limit on lawmaking bodies. It's really the basis of Marbury v. Madison and the Bill of Rights that was being formed in the 1760s and colonists argued the Parliament could not exercise unlimited power. The reason that this idea came about in America was due to the prior existence of written constitutions in the colonies. And I had never thought about this before. But in each colony, there were documents existing long prior to the 1760s that established some of the rights of the colonists. The Massachusetts Bay Colony charter originated in commercial charters, and evolved to frame government in that state. Crown charters in Connecticut and Rhode Island were designed as instruments of government, and proprietary grants, such as in New York, Maryland, and North and South Carolina provided for governmental institutions. William Penn, described by Bailyn as "courtier and sectarian; saint, schemer, and scholar," created frameworks of government in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Bailyn writes that, "By the Revolutionary period, the surviving charters, which in origins had been the instruments of the aggressive creation, or legitimation, of power, had become defensive bulwarks against the misuse of power." They were viewed as confirming a much older common law of Englishmen, with rights for the colonists that could not be abridged so easily by their colonial assemblies.
Another major question was where sovereignty rested in government. In the 17th century, England had battled over the question between sovereignty between Parliament and the King and the Parliament won, executing a king, and bringing over William of Orange as a king some decades later. In the Thirteen Colonies, the colonists argued that there was no absolute power within government at all--that power resided in the people, and needs to be divided within government and within federalism, a new idea. The idea morphed into the idea that Parliament could only legally issue external taxes on the colonies before colonists soon started arguing that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies at all.
This was a fantastic book that I would recommend to any reader of American history. It is encouraging to read as an American about the genius of our Founding Fathers. Bailyn sums up the ideological revolution of the American Revolution well. He points out that it was Americans who conceived of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and the people. Americans were those who believed that human rights existed above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity. Americans were those who saw that absolute sovereignty in government didn't need to be the monopoly of one agency but could be shared between agencies and branches of government to regulate itself. These ideas were revolutions in thought that have since swept the world over in a global ideological revolution.
Miscellaneous:
- I thought this was interesting. Jonathan Mayhew envisioned future streams of refugees leaving Europe for liberty in America, and asked "who knows?" that "our liberties being thus established, ... on some future occasion ... we or our posterity may even have the great felicity and honor to ... keep Britain herself from ruin," which of course is exactly what happened in WWII.
