Dr. Paul Rahe
How radical was the American Revolution?
Paul Rahe, Ph.D., is the Jay P. Walker Professor of American
History at the University of Tulsa. Dr. Rahe is internationally
recognized and honored for his work in the history of the
American government. He is the author of more than 50 scholarly
articles, book reviews, and other publications, including
the four-volume Republics Ancient and Modern. Dr. Rahe came
to the College as part of the E.L. Wiegand Distinguished Visiting
Lecturer Program, which was established to bring distinguished
speakers to Thomas Aquinas College and St. John’s College.
Following is our abridged version of his Presidents’
Day lecture he gave at the College on February 25, 1999.
My subject is the American Revolution. The question I pose
is: How radical was that Revolution?
Through much of the 17th and 18th centuries, the British
colonial system was managed by men such as John Locke, who
saw the potential for economic and technological development.
In part, as a consequence of their efforts to encourage immigration,
the American population grew at far too fast a rate to be
compatible with the maintenance of traditional, comparatively
uniform communities. In practice, subsistence farming was
quite common and perhaps even predominant in the Northeast,
but the same cannot be said for the South. Well before the
Revolution, the colonies had become, in spirit and in fact,
mostly what they were meant to be from the start: Dynamic,
commercial societies, intimately tied by trade to the mother
country.
Like their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, especially
the dissenters and Low-Church Anglicans, educated Americans
tended to be familiar with the writings of John Locke. And
those works confirmed their inclination towards an independence
of mind in matters religious, moral, and political. No political
work was to be found in more colonial libraries than Locke’s
two treatises on government. In the sermons, pamphlets, and
newspapers published in America during the decisive period
stretching from 1760 to 1776, none was as often cited, quoted,
paraphrased, plagiarized, and applied to the crisis that arose.
Locke’s sly exploitation of religious rhetoric enabled
unsuspecting clergymen throughout the colonies to present
his novel political doctrine to their parishioners as the
teachings of St. Paul.
If self-respect and a sense of their own dignity as Englishmen
gave the colonists a powerful motive for resenting Parliament’s
attempts to tax them without expressly securing their consent,
the Lockean first principle, so visible in the political books
they read, provided them with a theoretical framework justifying,
by an appeal to nature and nature’s God, their conviction
that the self-government and effective autonomy accorded them
in the past were theirs – not by custom, charter, or
royal grace – but simply and solely by right. In reading
these works, the Americans also came across the schemes of
political architecture pioneered during England’s Great
Rebellion, by figures such as James Harrington, adapted under
the restoration by Locke and his fellow Whigs, and further
elaborated after the Glorious Revolution of 1687 and 1688
as a critique of the machinations of England’s court
party by the radical Whigs and their successors.
John Adams discerned what was at stake from the outset. In
1765, right at the beginning, he demonstrated the American
tendency to augur misgovernment at a distance and to sniff
the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze, when he sought
to set the struggle with Parliament in the context of world
history. Already at this point the Americans were thinking
of themselves as transforming the world. Behind Parliament’s
imposition of the Stamp Act, he discerned a direct, informal
design to enslave all America.
He readily conceded that the Reformation, the Great Rebellion
and the Glorious Revolution had left the alliance between
designing clerics and the ambitious kings in Great Britain
greatly mutilated. But he nonetheless contended that in this
island kingdom, this wicked confederacy was not yet destroyed.
To the forebears of his fellows colonists, Adams attributed
an utter contempt of all that dark ribaldry of hereditary,
indefeasible right, the Lord’s anointed and the divine,
miraculous original of government, with which the priesthood
had enveloped the feudal monarch in clouds and mystery and
from whence they had deduced the most mischievous of all doctrines,
that of passive obedience and nonresistance.
To his contemporaries, he addressed an appeal calling on
them to abandon that timidity which made them afraid to think.
“Let it be known,” he wrote, “that British
liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments, but
original rights, conditions of original contracts, co-equal
with prerogative and with government, that many of our rights
are inherent and essential, agreed upon as maxims and established
as preliminaries even before a Parliament existed.” And
he called on his fellow colonists to search out the foundation
of British laws and government in the frame of human nature,
in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world. In
short, Adams demanded that the colonists abandon respect for
prescription and put asunder what the court Whigs and Edmund
Burke had worked so hard to bring together. In effect he asked
them to embrace one England and repudiate the other England
– which, whether he then confessed it or not in 1765,
was to call for a revolution.
Few, if any, among Adams’ contemporaries relished the
prospect of the colonies severing their ties with the mother
country. And they recognized the need for what they termed
“a super intending power.” And so, while reasserting
the radical Whig principles that establish popular self-government
as a matter of right rather than revokable privilege, they
grounded this right in nature as well as in the particular
history of the English constitution and sought some expedient
by which to reconcile their assertion of this right with an
allegiance to Great Britain.
In the very first pamphlet, provoked by the Stamp Act crisis,
James Otis of Boston took up the suggestion, advanced by Benjamin
Franklin in 1754, that the Americans be given representation
in Parliament, arguing that this body could then legitimately
tax the colonists.
Otis’ proposal turned out to be unacceptable to both
parties to the dispute. Many of the colonists entertained
grave misgivings. It was common practice for a representative’s
constituents to give detailed instructions to the man whom
they elected to the assembly. And it was recognized that,
in an age in which it took three months to sail from the New
World to the Old, it would be extremely difficult to hold
accountable representatives who resided at so great distance.
Otis’ proposal was unacceptable to Parliament because
it would have opened a can of worms. It would have undone
the compromise worked out within Britain’s political
class in the first quarter-century following the Glorious
Revolution. And it would have dispelled the illusion of historical
continuity and the sense of tradition that even those within
Parliament most sympathetic to the Americans thought it essential
to sustain. In the midst of the spirited campaign for parliamentary
reform and a re-apportionment of seats carried on by John
Wilkes and his radicals, it would have been totally impossible
for Parliament to extend representation to the colonies overseas,
while at the same time maintaining the rotten boroughs at
home and denying representation to Manchester, Birmingham,
Sheffield and other populous English localities which elected
no members to Parliament.
The colonists ultimately judged the compromise suggested
by Benjamin Franklin unworkable. As John Dickson would ultimately
point out, the colonists could trust no one but their own
duly-elected representatives. The money said to be taken from
us for our defense, they said, may be employed for our injury.
Finally in desperation, as colonial resistance provoked parliament
to pass more coercive acts, figures such as Thomas Jefferson,
John Adams, James Irondale and James Wilson sought another
way out. They refused to acknowledge that Parliament had any
right to legislate for the colonies at all. They asserted
that the colonial assemblies were Parliament’s equals.
And they contended that the Empire was held together by a
common executive, by the King.
No one in Parliament would have been willing to concede to
the monarch the capacity to act contrary to the wishes of
Parliament in any sphere at all. And George III knew better
than to think that he could get away with the attempt. The
only expedient that might have worked was the one suggested
by Edmund Burke. Parliament might have continued to take for
granted its own supremacy. The colonists, in their turn, might
have continued in their presumption that an assembly, in no
way accountable to them, could in no way pretend to speak
for them or represent their interests. And the peace between
them could nonetheless be maintained as it had been before
1763, but this would have been possible only if Parliament
had practiced restraint.
Americans grasped the nettle which the British had refused
in 1688 and 1689 and they embarked on a journey. As they approached
the fateful decision, Thomas Payne published his famous pamphlet,
“Common Sense,” encouraging them with the thought
that their cause was, in great measure, the cause of all mankind,
that their struggle for independence marked the birthday of
a new world and that it was in their power to begin the world
all over again. This they came to believe. For when they selected
a design for the great seal of the United States of America,
which is inscribed on the back of the dollar bill, they made
its principle theme the assertion that 1776 marked the beginning
of a “new order of the ages.” And in the aftermath,
they began to renumber the years, not from the birth of Christ,
but from the American Revolution.
No one ever spoke more eloquently of the revolutionary implications
of America’s Declaration of Independence than the man
who had drafted the pertinent document. Not long before the
fiftieth anniversary of its adoption and signing, Thomas Jefferson
received an invitation asking that he journey from Monticello
to Washington, D.C., to join the festivities held to commemorate
the event. Though weakened by disease, the statesman marshaled
his meager physical resources and in his last surviving letter
he described the choice made on the Fourth of July, 1776,
in language echoing the words of the Whig martyr William Russell
for the role he had played in the Rye House plot: “May
it be to the world what I believe it will be, to some part
sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of
arousing men to burst the chains under which monking ignorance
and superstition had persuaded them to binding themselves
and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.
That form, which we have substituted, restores the free right
to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom whereby all
eyes are opening or are opened to the rights of man. The general
spread of the light of science had already laid open to every
view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been
born with saddles on their back, nor a favored few booted
and spurred, ready to ride them by the grace of God.”
Thomas Paine had been correct when he asserted that America’s
cause was in great measure the cause of all mankind. By stepping
in where their Anglo forebearers had feared to tread, the
Americans set an example that would, they fully hoped and
expected, set the world on fire. And it still does.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 2000
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