Selected quotes from The Ideological Origins of the American...
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Jul 30, 2025
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Selected quotes from The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Bailyn)
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John Adams to Jefferson (1815): "What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington."
3
More than 400 [pamphlets] bearing on the Anglo-American controversy were published between 1750 and 1776; over 1,500 appeared by 1783. Explanatory as well as declarative, and expressive of the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations as well of the professed goals of those who led and supported the Revolution, the pamphlets are the distinctive literature of the Revolution. They reveal, more clearly than any other single group of documents, the contemporary meaning of that transforming event.
4
For the primary goal of the American Revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.
5
Most conspicuous in the writings of the Revolutionary period was the heritage of classical antiquity. Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education, and references to them and their works abound in the literature. From the grammar schools, from the colleges, from private tutors and independent reading came a general familiarity with and the habit of reference to the ancient authors and the heroic personalities and events of the ancient world.
6
What is basically important in the Americans' reading of the ancients is the high selectivity of their real interests and the limitation of the range of their effective knowledge. For though the colonists drew their citations from all portions of the literature of the ancient world, their detailed knowledge and engaged interest covered only one era and one small group of writers. What gripped their minds, what they knew in detail, and what formed their view of the whole of the ancient world was the political history of Rome from the conquests in the east and the civil wars in the early first century BC to the establishment of the empire on the ruins of the republic at the end of the second century AD.
7
More directly influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generations were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism—writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.
8
Just as the colonists cited with enthusiasm the theorists of universal reason, so too did they associate themselves, with offhand familiarity, with the tradition of the English common law. The great figures of England's legal history, especially the seventeenth-century common lawyers, were referred to repeatedly—by the colonial lawyers above all, but by others as well.
9
The common lawyers the colonists cited, for example, sought to establish right by appeal to precedent and to an unbroken tradition evolving from time immemorial, and they assumed, if they did not argue, that the accumulation of the ages, the burden of inherited custom, contained within it a greater wisdom than any man or group of men could devise by the power of reason. Nothing could have been more alien to the Enlightenment rationalists whom the colonists also quoted—and with equal enthusiasm. These theorists felt that it was precisely the heavy crust of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man; they sought to throw it off and to create by the unfettered power of reason a framework of institutions superior to the accidental inheritance of the past.
10
Everywhere there was corruption—corruption technically, in the adroit manipulation of Parliament by a power-hungry ministry, and corruption generally, in the self-indulgence, effeminizing luxury, and gluttonous pursuit of gain of a generation sunk in new and unaccustomed wealth. If nothing were done to stop the growth of these evils, England would follow so many other nations into a tyranny from which there would be no recovery. But if these dark thoughts, in the England of Walpole and Gibbon, attained popularity in certain opposition, radical, and noncomformist circles, they had relatively little political influence in the country at large. In the mainland colonies of North America, however, they were immensely popular and influential. There, an altered condition of life made what in England were considered to be extreme, dislocating ideas sound like simple statements of fact.
11
The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
12
"Power" to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion.
13
Footnote: From at least the mid-seventeenth century, writings on the absolutism of the Turks had served in England as disguised tracts for the times, commentaries "upon the English polity from a safe vantage point." ... As a result, long before the Revolution the colonists were habituated to conceive of "the difference between free and enslaved countries" as "the difference between England and Turkey."
14
Like their contemporaries in England and like their predecessors for centuries before, the colonists at the beginning of the Revolutionary controversy understood by the word "constitution" not, as we would have it, a written or even an unwritten but deliberately contrived design of government and a specification of rights beyond the power of ordinary legislation to alter; they thought of it, rather, as the constituted—that is, existing‚ arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them.
15
For if the ostensible purpose of all government was the good of the people, the particular goal of the English constitution—"its end, its use, its designation and scope"—was known to all, and declared by all, to be the attainment of liberty. This was its peculiar "grandeur" and excellence; it was for this that it should be prized "next to our Bibles, above the privileges of the world." It was for this that it should be blessed, supported, and maintained, and transmitted "in full, to posterity" (Adams).
16
It was common knowledge, expressed in such familiar cliches, a Virginian complained, "that the merest sciolist, the veriest smatterer in politics must long since have had them all by rote," that English society consisted of three social orders, or estates, each with its own rights and privileges, and each embodying within it the principles of a certain form of government: royalty, whose natural form of government was monarchy; the nobility, whose natural form of government aristocracy; and the commons, wohse natural form was democracy.
17
Footnote: It is suggested below... that in America the origins of the modern doctrine of the separation of functioning powers lay in the Revolutionary effort to recreate balance in governments within a society systematically lacking in divisions of rank or estate.
18
It was taken as a maxim by all, whether or not they used the point to explain how the executive branch entered into the separation of powers, that it was the function of the judges "to settle the contests between prerogative and liberty... to ascertain the bounds of sovereign power, and to determine the rights of the subject," and that in order for them to perform this duty properly they must be "perfectly free from the influence of either."
19
Liberty, that is, was the capacity to exercise "natural rights" within limits set not by the mere will or desire of men in power but by non-arbitrary law—law enacted by legislatures containing within them the proper balance of forces.
20
"Liberty," James Otis wrote in a sentence that reveals much of the structure of the colonists' historical thought, "was better understood and more fully enjoyed by our ancestors before the coming in of the first Norman tyrants than ever after, till it was found necessary for the salvation of the kingdom to combat the arbitrary and wicked proceedings of the Stuarts." The period before the Norman conquest was the greatest age of English history.
21
Political liberty, based upon a landholding system "the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century," had flourished in this ancient, pre-feudal elysium. But then had come the conquest, and with it the imposition of feudal tyranny upon gothic liberty. "The spirit of the English nation, depressed and broken by the Norman conquest, for many years quietly gave way to the rage of despotism, and peaceably submitted to the most abject vassallage."
22
Just as their Saxon ancestors had left "their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe," the settlers of America had emigrated to create in a new land civil and ecclesiastical governments purer, freer than those they had left behind. The transplantation had been made from an undefiled branch of the nation, strong, healthy, brimming with the juices of liberty, and it had been placed in a soil perfect for its growth.
23
No less a figure than Voltaire had stated that America was the refinement of all that was good in England, writing in his Lettres philosophiques that Penn and the Quakers had actually brought into existence "that golden age of which men talk so much and which probably has never existed anywhere except in Pennsylvania."
24
Over $1,000,000, [John Dickinson] wrote his father, had been expended in efforts to manipulate the general election. The starting price for the purchase of votes in one northern borough [in England], he reported, was 200 guineas.
25
John Dickinson: "Bribery is so common that it is thought there is not a borough in England where it is not practiced, and it is certain that many very flourishing ones are ruined, their manufactories decayed, and their trade gone by their dependence on what they get by their votes."
26
At home in Maryland two years later it seemed more evident than ever to the younger [Charles] Carroll that the English constitution "was hastening to its final period of dissolution, and the symptoms of a general decay are but too visible." Sell your estate in England, he advised an English friend, and "purchase lands in this province where liberty will maintain her empire till a dissoluteness of morals, luxury, and venality shall have prepared the degenerate sons of some future age to prefer their own mean lucre, the bribes, and the smiles of corruption and arbitrary ministers to patriotism, to glory, and to the public weal."
27
The danger to America, it was believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of the greater whole whose ultimate manifestation would be the destruction of the English constitution, with all the rights and privileges embedded in it. This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists' struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition. For, once assumed, it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign.
28
In particular, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, an arm of the Church created in 1701 to aid in bringing the Gospel to pagan Indians, was said by 1763 to have "long had a formal design to root out Presbyterianism, etc., and to establishing both episcopacy and bishops." This suspicion, which had smoldered in the breasts of New Englanders and nonconformists throughout the colonies for half a century or more, had burst into flame repeatedly, but never so violently as in 1763, in the Mayhew-Apthorp controversy which climaxed years of growing anxiety that plans were being made to establish an American episcopate.
29
On May 10, 1768, a mob, assembled in St. George's Fields, London, in support of the imprisoned Wilkes, was fired upon by the regiment of Foot Guards that had been summoned by the nervous magistrates. Several deaths resulted, the most dramatic being that of a boy, wrongly identified as a leader of the mob, who was tracked down and shot to death on orders of the commander. The political capital made of this episode by the Wilkesites and other anti-government groups in London, who declared it to have been a deliberately planned "massacre," was echoed loudly in the colonies, the more so when it appeared that convictions of the guilty soldiers by normal processes of law were being quashed by the government. Could it be believed to be a coincidence that in February 1770 an eleven-year-old boy was also shot to death in a Boston riot by a suspected customs informer? This was more than a parallel to what had happened in London: the two events were two effects of the same cause.
30
The acquittal of the indicted soldiers did not alter the conviction that the Massacre was the logical work of a standing army, for it accentuated the parallel with the English case which also had concluded with acquittal; and in Boston too there was suspicion of irregularities. How the murderers managed to escape was known to some, it was said, but was "too dark to explain."
31
Footnote: The view of the Massacre held by John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr., the lawyers who successfully defended the soldiers in court, is especially important. Both thought the Massacre was "the strongest of proofs of the danger of standing armies" despite their efforts on the soldiers' behalf; Adams saw nothing incompatible between the verdict of the jury and his being invited to deliver one of the orations commemorating the Massacre, and Quincy publicly urged continued discussion of the "fatal effects of the policy of standing armies and... quartering troops in populous cities in time of peace."
32
In a period of two months in the spring of 1774 Parliament took its revenge in a series of coercive actions no liberty-loving people could tolerate: the Boston Port Act, intended, it was believed, to snuff out the economic life of the Massachusetts metropolis; the Administration of Justice Act, aimed at crippling judicial processes once and for all by permitting trials to be held in England for offenses committed in Massachusetts; the Massachusetts Government Act, which stripped from the people of Massachusetts the protection of the British constitution by giving over all the "democratic" elements of the province's government—even popularly elected juries and town meetings—into the hands of the executive power; the Quebec Act, which, while not devised as a part of the coercive program, fitting it nicely, in the eyes of the colonists, by extending the boundaries of a "papist" province, and one governed wholly be prerogative, south into territory claimed by Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; finally, the Quartering Act, which permitted the seizure of unoccupied buildings for the use of troops on orders of the governors alone even in situations, such as Boston's, where barracks were available in the vicinity.
33
Still another explanation, drawing no less directly on fears that had lain at the root of opposition ideology in England since the turn of the century, emphasized the greed of a "monied interest" created by the crown's financial necessities and the power of a newly risen, arrogant, and irresponsible capitalist group, that battened on wars and stock manipulation. The creation of this group was accompanied "by levying of taxes, by a host of tax gatherers, and a long train of dependents of the crown. The practice grew into system, till at length the crown found means to break down those barriers which the constitution had assigned to each branch of the legislature, and effectually destroyed the independence of both Lords and Commons.
34
The reason "the constitution at this moment stands violated," this grandson of "Diamond Pitt," East India merchant and governor of Madras, declared, is perfectly clear: "For some years past there has been an influx of wealth into this country which as been attended with many fatal consequences, because it has not been the regular, natural produce of labor and industry... My Lords, I say nothing but what is within the knowledge of us all; the corruption of the people is the great original cause of the discontents of the people themselves, of the enterprise of the crown, and the notorious decay of the internal vigor of the constitution."
35
The analogy to the decline and fall of Rome and its empire was intriguing and informative; others carried it further and became more specific. Like Rome in its decline, England, "from being the nursery of heroes, became the residence of musicians, pimps, panders, and catamites." The swift decline of her empire, which, it was observed, had reached its peak only between 1758 and the Stamp Act, resulted from the same poison that had proved so fatal to free states in classical antiquity: the corruption, effeminacy, and languor that came from "the riches and luxuries of the East" and led to a calamitous "decay of virtue" and the collapse of the constitution.
36
It had been the Stamp Act that had led John Adams to see in the original settlement of the colonies "the opening of a grand scene and design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth." And Jonathan Mayhew, celebrating the conclusion of the same episode, had envisioned future streams of refugees escaping from a Europe sunk in "luzury, debauchery, venality, intestine quarrels, or other vices." It was even possible, Mayhew had added, "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."
37
Who ought to suppress as "whimsical and enthusiastical" the belief that the colonies were to become "the foundation of a great and mighty empire, the largest the world ever saw to be founded on such principles of liberty and freedom, both civil and religious... [and] which shall be the principal seat of that glorious kingdom which Christ shall erect upon earth in the latter days?" America "ere long will build an empire upon the ruins of Great Britain; will adopt its constitution purged of its impurities, and from an experience of its defects will guard against those evils which have wasted its vigor and brought it to an untimely end." The hand of God was "in America now giving a new epocha to the history of the world."
38
In its original, medieval, form elective representation to Parliament had been a device by which "local men, locally minded, whose business began and ended with the interests of the constituency," were enabled, as attorneys for their electors, to seek redress from the royal court of Parliament, in return for which they were expected to commit their constituents to grants of financial aid. Attendance at Parliament of representatives of the commons was for the most part an obligation unwillingly performed, and local communities bound their representatives to local interest in every way possible: by requiring local residency or the ownership of property as a qualification for election, by closely controlling the payment of wages for official services performed, by instructing representatives minutely as to their powers and the limits of permissible concessions, and by making them strictly accountable for all actions taken in the name of the constituents. As a result, representatives of the commons in the medieval Parliament did not speak for that estate in general or for any other body or group larger than the specific one that had elected them.
39
Changing circumstances, however, had drastically altered this form and practice of representation. By the time the institutions of government were taking firm shape in the American colonies, Parliament in England had been transformed. The restrictions that had been placed upon representatives of the commons to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away; members came to sit "not merely as parochial representatives, but as delegates of all the commons of the land."
40
Symbolically incorporating the state, Parliament in effect had become the nation for purposes of government, and its members virtually if not actually, symbolically if not by sealed orders, spoke for all as well as for the group that had chosen them. They stood for the interest of the realm; for Parliament, in the words by which Edmund Burke immortalized this whole concept of representation, was not "a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole."
41
The restrictions once placed upon representatives to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away. But the colonists, reproducing English institutions in miniature, had been led by force of circumstance to move in the opposite direction. Starting with seventeenth-century assumptions, out of necessity they drifted backward, as it were, toward the medieval form of attorneyship in representation.
42
For the principal English argument put forward in defense of Parliament's right to pass laws taxing the colonies was that the colonists, like "nine tenths of the people in Britain" who do not choose representatives to Parliament, were in fact represented there. The power of actually voting for representatives, it was claimed, was an accidental and not a necessary attribute of representation, "for the right of election is annexed to certain species of property, to peculiar franchises, and to inhabitancy in certain places."
43
While [James] Otis was quoting Coke together with Vattel without grasping the implications of their conjunction, others were referring to constitutions as "a sort of fundamental laws"; as the common law; as Parliament; and as the whole complex of existing laws and public institutions. The transition to more advanced ground was forced forward by the continuing need, after 1764, to distinguish fundamentals from institutions and from the actions of government so that they might serve as limits and controls. Once its utility was perceived and demonstrated, this process of disengaging principles from institutions and from the positive actions of government and then of conceiving of them as fixed sets of rules and boundaries, went on swiftly.
44
In 1768 Samuel Adams, accustomed to drawing more extreme conclusions than most of contemporaries, wrote in a series of letters in behalf of the Massachusetts House of Representatives that "the constitution is fixed; it is from thence that the supreme legislative as well as the supreme executive derives its authority," and he incorporated the same language into the famous Massachusetts Circular Letter of that year. At the same time a Philadelphian, William Hicks, wrote that if one were to concede that statutes were "a part of [the] constitution" simply because they were once promulgated by government, one would have no basis for restraining the actions of any government.
45
In 1769 the emerging logic was carried further by Zubly, who flatly distinguished legislatures from the constitution, and declared that the existing Parliament "derives its authority and power from the constitution, and not the constitution from Parliament." The constitution, he wrote, "is permanent and ever the same," and Parliament "can no more make laws which are against the constitution or the unalterable privileges of the British subjects than it can alter the constitution itself... The power of Parliament, and of every branch of it, has its bounds assigned by the constitution."
46
The primary function of the constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers—hence in England, where there was no constitution, there were no limits (save for the effect of trial by jury) to what the legislature might do. In order to confine the ordinary actions of government, the constitution must be grounded in some fundamental source of authority, some "higher authority than the giving out temporary laws." This special authority could be gained if the constitution were created by "an act of all," and it would acquire permanence if it were embodied "in some written charter."
47
The Massachusetts Bay charter in particular "approximated a popular constitution," Professor McIlwain has written, "more closely than any other instrument of government in actual use up to that time in America or elsewhere in modern times." It is hardly surprising, he concludes, that the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639, "the first American constitution accepted by the people," should have been written by men who emigrated from Massachusetts.
48
The Pilgrims, responding not to theory but to the practical needs of everyday life, drew up a code of law as early as 1636: "it contains," a leading authority on the early history of American law has written, "a rudimentary bill of rights," which, when elaborated and enlarged in the later years of the seventeenth century, "became a recognizably modern bill of rights." The Puritans did the same, also within two decades of settlement. Their Laws and Liberties of 1648 was in design an abridgment of the laws they had themselves enacted; but, "the culmination of an extraordinarily creative period" of legal and constitutional thought, it went beyond restating and digesting the laws in force, to define "the just rights and privileges of every freeman." It quickly became famous, and influential, in all the colonies. It proved to be "the fountainhead of Massachusetts law during most of the seventeenth century, and even thereafter, and its provisions were widely copied by other colonies, or used by them as models in framing their own laws. Through such intercolonial borrowing, its influence spread into other parts of New England, beyond to New York and even to Delaware and Pennsylvania."
49
By no means all of these documents were bills of rights as we know them. Most of them were not thought of as defining rights antecedent to government and law, rights to which government and law must accommodate themselves. The most common assumption behind them was, rather, that these were rights that the law—English law if not colonial—already provided for and that were nor being compiled simply to make them better known and more readily available for reference in a wilderness environment.
50
The idea of sovereignty current in the English-speaking world of the 1760s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688. It was composed essentially of two elements. The first was the notion that there must reside somewhere in every political unit a singly, undivided, final power, higher in legal authority than any other power, subject to no law, a law unto itself.
51
Derived in part from the political theory of classical antiquity, in part from Roman law, and in part from medieval thought, this idea came to England most directly in the sixteenth-century writings, especially those of Jean Bodin, that sought to justify and fortify monarchical supremacy. But in these early writings the concept of sovereignty still retained important limitations derived from its legal, religious, and pre-national origins. By sovereign Bodin had meant supreme, but not arbitrary: not without restrictions or controls, that is; the action of the sovereign state, he assumed, must still "embody the law of nature and of God."
52
By the mid-eighteenth century this Whig conception of a sovereign Parliament had hardened into orthodoxy. In the year of the Stamp Act, it was given its classic formulation by Blackstone, who wrote in his Commentaries that "there is and must be in all [forms of government] a supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summi imperii, or the rights of sovereignty, reside," and that in England this "sovereignty of the British constitution" was lodged in Parliament, the aggregate body of King, Lords, and Commons, whose actions "no power on earth can undo."
53
Franklin: "An external tax is a duty laid on commodities imported; that duty is added to the first cost and other charges on the commodity, and, when it is offered to sale, makes a part of the price. If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it. But an internal tax is forced from the people without their consent, if not laid by their own representatives."
54
Franklin: "Many arguments have been lately used here to show them that there is no difference, and that if you have no right to tax them internally, you have none to tax them externally, or make any other law to bind them. At present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments."
55
Defenders of American claims were forced to move on to the politically more extreme position that the Massachusetts House had maintained. Acknowledging the impossibility of convincing the authorities in England that Parliament's sovereignty might be divisible, they pursued, with careful logic and a wealth of legal learning, the idea of an imperial federation of sovereign states sharing and establishing unity in a single monarch.
56
If, Moses Mather argued, two supreme powers within a single state are really "the height of political absurdity" then let Parliament's power be totally excluded from the colonies. But the exclusion of Parliament's authority would not necessarily mean the total elimination of all links to England. For, he explained, a "state" was, after all, only "a country or body of people that are connected and united under one and the same constitution of civil government," and there was therefore no contradiction in conceiving of two such entities sharing the same king.
57
To conceive of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and their voices as mechanically exact expressions of the people; to assume, and act under the assumption, that human rights exist above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity; to understand constitutions to be ideal designs of government, and fixed, limiting definitions of its permissible sphere of action; and to consider the possibility that absolute sovereignty in government need not be the monopoly of a single all-engrossing agency but (imperium in imperio) the shared possession of several agencies each limited by the boundaries of the others but all-powerful within its own—to think in these ways, as Americans were doing before Independence, was to reconceive the fundamentals of government and of society's relation to government.
58
Slavery as a political concept had specific meaning which a later generation would lose. To eighteenth-century Americans it meant, as a newspaper writer put it in 1747, "a force upon humane nature, buy which a man is obliged to act, or not to act, according to the arbitrary will and pleasure of another"; it meant, a later pamphleteer wrote, "being wholly under the power and control of another as to our actions and properties." It meant the inability to maintain one's just property in material things and abstract rights, rights and things which a proper constitution guaranteed a free people.
59
The presence of an enslaved Negro population in America inevitably became a political issue where slavery had this general meaning. The contrast between what political leaders in the colonies sought for themselves and what they imposed on, or at least tolerated in, others became too glaring to be ignored and could not be lightened by appeals to the Lockean justification of slavery as the favorable fate of people who "by some act that deserves death" had forfeited their lives and had been spared by the the generosity of their captors.
60
Some found at least a partial excuse in pointing out, with Jefferson, that repeated attempts by certain colonies to ban the salve trade or tax it out of existence had met resounding vetoes in England so that the good of the colonies and the rights of human nature had been sacrificed to "the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs."
61
Footnote: David Ramsay: "In no age before, and in no other country, did man ever possess an election of the kind of government under which he would choose to live. The constituent parts of the ancient free governments were thrown together by accident. The freedom of modern European governments was, for the most part, obtained by the concessions or liberality of monarchs or military leaders. In America alone, reason and liberty concurred in the formation of constitutions."
62
Many, of course, disagreed with such proposals. John Adams believed that arguments in favor of creating an America life peerage were part of the general plot against liberty hatched in the corrupt centers of power in England and America. But ideas in favor of creating some kind of social basis for constitutional balance were widespread, even among those who opposed the strengthening of English power in America.
63
Footnote: [John Adams's] conclusion that he "never understood" what a republican government was ("and I believe no other man ever did or ever will") appears to be well substantiated by his subsequent statement that "to speak technically, or scientifically, if you will, there are monarchical aristocratical, and democratical republics" (...). Throughout, however, he was grappling with the problem of recreating the "equipoised" balance of the English constitution in the circumstances of the American states.
64
Yet however representative of the interests of society this single assembly might be, it should not be given control of all the branches of government, for it was the nature of popular assemblies to be fickle, "productive of hasty results and absurd judgments," avaricious, and ambitious. Difficult for the electorate to control, an unchecked representative assembly would quickly make itself permanent, and pass and execute laws for its own benefit. And in any case popular assemblies were unsuited to exercise certain of the powers of government: they were too open and inefficient to act as an executive, and too slow in procedure and ignorant of the law to act as a judiciary. The organization of government "ought to be more complex" than a single unicameral legislature.
65
Riches in a new country like America signified nothing more than the accident of prior settlement. The accumulation of wealth had been "unavoidable to the descendants of the early settlers" since the land, originally cheap, had appreciated naturally with the growth of settlement.
66
Richard Bland: "Perhaps it is owing to this accidental manner of becoming rich that wealth does not obtain to the same degree of influence here which it does in old countries. Rank, at present, in America is derived more from qualification than property; a sound moral character, amiable manners, and firmness in principle constitute the first class, and will continue to do so till the origin of families be forgotten, and the proud follies of the old world overrun the simplicity of the new."
67
Indeed, one could make a complete inversion and claim that, properly, the external affluence of magistrates should be the consequence of, not the prior qualification for, the judicious exercise of public authority over others.
68
Patrick Henry, the most ardent of the antifederalist spokesmen, based his philosophy of government on the universal force and moral validity of what he called "self-love."
69
Britain's freedom has survived, [Patrick] Henry concluded, not because of the people's virtue but because the monarch's "self-love, [his] self-interest," coincides with the advancement of the nation's prosperity. The monarch remains monarch for life, and his narrowest self-interest is therefore nourished by the nation's successes and good fortune. But "the President and Senators have nothing to lose. They have not that interest in the preservation of the government that the kinds and lords have in England. They will, therefore, be regardless of the interests of the people."
70
It was because of their fear of human depravity, of mankind's selfish neglect of the public good and passionate devotion to the narrowest self-interest, that the antifederalists were certain that an extended republic, of continental dimensions, could never survive as a free state and would end either as a military dictatorship or as a junta of ruthless aristocrats.
71
For Noah Webster, commissioned publicist of the federalist cause, the question was simply unreal: "the principles and habits of the Americans are directly opposed to standing armies; and there is little necessity to guard against them by positive constitutions as to prohibit the establishment of the Mahometan religion." Is Mahometanism prohibited in the state constitution? No.
72
[Federalists'] aim was to was to show, by close analysis, that while a national army was necessary, the regular army of the United States would not—could not—be a "standing" army in the traditional sense. If it ever became that, freedom would already—for other, deeper reasons—have been destroyed: at that point "there will not be a particle of virtue in the people; they will be ripe for the most corrupt government."
73
...in an extensive federal system like that of the United States, factions lose their foe before they reach the seat of government. "The different powers are so modified and distributed as to form mutual checks upon each other," thus preventing a plebiscitarian upheaval. The people at large will not need to maintain eternal vigilance. Their representatives and the internal checks of the system itself will do the job for them, and therefore all that is required of the people is to participate in frequent elections and to attend closely to their own personal interests.
74
[Madison] did not simply assume faction and interest; most commentators, antifederalists as well as federalists, did that. He defined them, and showed that they were "sown in the nature of man," manifested particularly in the inescapable inequalities in the distribution of property. Then he logically reduced the possibility of coping with faction to controlling its effects, and demonstrated that this would be possible only in extended republics.
75
It all went back to Montesquieu, [William Vans] Murray wrote, and the trouble with Montesquieu is that he had "never studied a free democracy." If he had, he would have realized that "a greater share of virtue is not [more] necessary to a democratic than to a monarchical form." It wasn't really a question of virtue: virtue was necessary for both forms.
76
"The great Montesquieu," [Noah] Webster assumed, had meant "patriotism, or disinterested public spirit and love of one's country." But had that ever, truly, existed in human society? If that is what virtue means, and if one is talking about actual, operational human motivation, then virtue has never been, and is not now, the peculiar attribute or "principle" of any form of government, republican, monarchical, or aristocratic. There is only one "real principle that is predominant in every individual and directs all his actions," Webster wrote, and that is "self-interest," and self-interest operates differently in different forms of government.
77
Noah Webster: "The system of the great Montesquieu will ever be erroneous till the words property or lands in fee simple are substituted for virtue, throughout his Spirit of Laws. Virtue, patriotism, or love of country never was and never will be, till mens' natures are changed, a fixed, permanent principle and support of government... An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic. While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form."
78
Abstract virtue—absolutely disinterested love of country—is unreal and has nothing to do with the matter.
