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42 pages 1 hour read

Bernard Bailyn

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1967

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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “The Literature of the Revolution”

Bailyn argues that most of the important writing of the American Revolution appeared in pamphlets. He defines the pamphlet form to explain why it was uniquely suited to topical polemics. Pamphlets could be written by one person, allowing a complete freedom of expression not possible in most periodicals. Pamphlets were easy to manufacture quickly and cheaply. Their greatest asset was flexibility in size, with the middle length most used by Revolutionary writers. The Revolutionary pamphlets generally fell into three categories: the largest number were responses to the significant events of the time, such as the Stamp Act; another group were series of individual exchanges with other pamphlet-writers, including arguments, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals; and a final group consisted of commemorative orations, such as printed sermons delivered on election days, but by the mid-1760s celebrations of political anniversaries, such as the repeal of the Stamp Act, also were included. Since the pamphlets expressed the beliefs and goals of those who supported the Revolution, they reveal the contemporary meaning of that event more than any other group of documents.

The American pamphlets do not compare as literature to the quality of British pamphlets, because the American pamphleteers were amateurs, unlike the professional British writers, such as Defoe and Swift. The American pamphleteers were lawyers, ministers, merchants, or planters, who turned to pamphlet-writing in response to the crisis in Anglo-American affairs. Although some Americans, such as Jefferson and Adams, had literary talent, they did not try to create literary effects in their political pamphlets. The Americans aimed in a rational, didactic, explanatory way to persuade their opponents, not to annihilate them like the British writers, who used imaginative metaphors. The Americans’ rationality stemmed from their goal, which was the preservation of political liberty, not the overthrow of the existing social order. Bailyn distinguishes the American Revolution from the social disruption of the French and Russian Revolutions, which sent “the foundations of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins” (19). America had already experienced many small changes over the course of the previous 100 years, which had gradually transformed the society—so there was no “sudden avalanche” (19). By 1763, many of the great institutions of European life, the established orthodox church and the authoritative state, had already been changed into a diminished form in the American wilderness environment.

Initially, the Anglo-American conflict centered on the question of the extent of Parliament’s authority in the colonies. However, the debate eventually concerned a range of social and political problems. By 1776, Americans began to think that their distinctive society, developed in the colonial wilderness, was not just “a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before” (20). They conceived of themselves as “uniquely placed by history […] to complete and fulfill, the promise of man’s existence” (20). Bailyn identifies three significant periods: up to and including 1776, discussing Anglo-American differences; devising the first state governments, 1776-1780; and reconsidering state constitutions and reconstructing the national government, mid-1780s-early 1790s. The most creative period was in the period before independence, when “explorations were made in new territories of thought, the first comprehensive maps sketched, and routes marked out” (21).

Chapter 2 Summary: “Sources and Traditions”

The development of a coherent ideology “of overwhelming persuasiveness to the majority of American leaders” and the meaning it gave to the events of the time and “not simply an accumulation of grievances” (22) explains the inception of the American Revolution. This configuration of ideas acted like “an intellectual switchboard wired so that certain combinations of events would activate a distinct set of signals—danger signals, indicating […] the likely trajectory of events” (22-23). Bailyn explains the sources of this world view. Although classical literature was commonly cited in the Revolutionary pamphlets, these examples were illustrative not determinative of the colonists’ political beliefs. The colonists particularly focused on the political history of ancient Rome when the republic was being challenged or its greatest days were being nostalgically celebrated by Roman historians who contrasted the earlier virtues with their own corrupt era. The colonists viewed England as equivalent to ancient historian Sallust’s Rome with its threat of tyranny, and they identified with Cato, the incorruptible foe of Julius Caesar.

Enlightenment rationalist thinkers were more influential in shaping Revolutionary thought, with colonists particularly citing John Locke on natural rights and the social and governmental contract. Also influential on the colonists was the tradition of English common law as embodying principles, precedents, and historical understanding. Theories of 17th-century New England Puritanism, modified over time into latitudinarianism, also conveyed to the Revolutionary generation the idea that America had a special destiny designed by God. However, these important clusters of ideas did not form a coherent system and somewhat contradicted each other: the common law was cited for its authority of inherited custom, yet Enlightenment rationalists sought to throw off custom by using reason to create new, superior frameworks, and the Puritan covenant theology assumed the inability of humans to improve their conditions by their own powers, requiring a total dependence on God.

What shaped these disparate ideas into a coherent ideology was the determinative influence of radical English opposition theorists, the “country” writers who criticized the “court” and ministerial powers in 18th century England. This tradition originated during the 17th century English Civil War and the Commonwealth period, but then was modified by early 18th-century writers. Important 17th-century figures in this tradition included John Milton, not primarily as a poet but as a political tract writer, and Algernon Sidney, author of Discourses Concerning Government (1698). 18th-century writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were the most influential publicists of this view of political liberty to the colonists who avidly read Cato’s Letters (1720-1723). Anglican bishop Benjamin Hoadly; Robert Viscount Molesworth, whose Account of Denmark (1694) detailed how free states succumb to absolutism; and Henry St. John Bolingbroke also warned of 18th-century English political corruption. These pessimistic reformers viewed Prime Minister Walpole as corrupting Parliament with preferments and bribes and corrupting the people who elected the legislative members; if left unchecked, such corruption would destroy liberty. The theory that power inevitably seeks to encroach on liberty unless people remain virtuous and vigilant seemed especially relevant in colonial American circumstances. The colonists viewed the new regulations imposed by England on America after 1763 in terms of this pattern of ideas.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics”

The pre-Revolutionary theory of politics rested on the belief that the disposition of power lay behind any political controversy. By power, the colonists meant “the dominion of some men over others […] force, compulsion” (56). These writers viewed power as ceaselessly aggressive, with a tendency to expand beyond legitimate boundaries, threatening liberty, which needed to be defended. A legitimate power of government was formed by a voluntary compact by all for the good of all. What transformed power into a dangerous force was the nature of humans—their susceptibility to corruption and their lust for self-aggrandizement. Since supreme power was wielded by humans armed with weapons, the 18th-century English opposition writers and the colonists reasoned that ruler-financed standing armies were a major threat to people’s liberty. When the colonists examined their contemporary world and history, they differentiated between free and enslaved nations, viewing the Turks as an example of what happens when a tyrant governs unchecked by law and assisted by a powerful army. Molesworth’s Account of Denmark demonstrated how the preservation of liberty depended on the capacity of the people to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power.

The colonists assumed that they shared in the English people’s unique inheritance of liberty. Although often threatened by would-be tyrants, the English had maintained a more successful control of power and human nature’s evil tendencies for a lengthier period than any other people. Before 1763, most colonists and the English believed that England’s “mixed” constitution was the wisest, best system of balancing the forces within society. The English constitution was not a written document but rather the existing “arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them” (68). The English society contained three social orders that each embodied the principles of a certain form of government: royalty, which was monarchy in government; nobility, which was aristocracy in government; and the commons, which was democracy in government. Each of these forms ideally could create good societies, but if unchecked monarchy could degenerate into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule. Theoretically, in England, these elements of society had a balanced sharing of power in government to prevent each one from dominating. It was not clear how these three social orders related to the functioning of the English government since the modern division of executive, legislative, and judicial powers did not yet exist. Explaining how the divisions of society pitted power against power in English government for the benefit of all became even more difficult when this system was applied to the colonies, but no one tried to settle this complex constitutional problem until the Revolutionary crisis.

The colonists conceptualized liberty as “the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, the natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom” (79). The essential rights were personal security, personal liberty, and private property, but no document could ever specify all God-given natural rights. The colonists’ view of the past defense of liberty in England not only importantly illustrated potential dangers but emphasized their own special role in history. The colonists viewed themselves and the English as descended from liberty-loving Saxons, who had each possessed a right to vote based on independent landholding prior to the Norman conquest, which established feudal tyranny. The Magna Carta and later safeguards were developed against tyranny until the 17th-century struggle against the Stuarts. This struggle had led to the settlement of America by people escaping temporal and spiritual tyranny. Not only the colonists but also many Enlightenment thinkers viewed the American colonies as a freer, purer England, with a virtuous simplicity of life and widespread landholding. By 1763, many colonists believed that, although liberty had been better preserved in England than elsewhere in the Old World, corruption was growing in England’s government and population. The 18th-century opposition writers noted this trend, as did American visitors to England. The system of ideas absorbed by the colonists asserted that when a government fails to serve the public welfare, it ought to be resisted.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Logic of Rebellion”

Bailyn argues that it was the meaning imparted to the events after 1763 by the colonists’ ideology that led to the colonists’ rebellion. The colonists’ “suspicion that the ever-present, latent danger of an active conspiracy of power against liberty was becoming manifest within the British Empire […] rose in the consciousness of a large segment of the American population” (95) prior to the well-known political events in the struggle with the British government. In 1763, the Mayhew-Apthorp controversy erupted regarding fear of an ecclesiastical conspiracy against Congregational and Presbyterian colonists’ long-established right to worship. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was the mission branch of the Church of England, ostensibly created to bring the gospel to Indigenous Americans. However, when the Society established a mission in Congregational-led Cambridge, Massachusetts, a significant number of nonconformist colonists viewed the Society’s true goal as the establishment of an Anglican bishop in America in an effort to force all colonists to conform to the Church of England. The Church of England was viewed as an arm of the British government, so spiritual tyranny was linked to the possibility of political tyranny in the colonists’ minds.

The passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 provided reinforcement for the belief that a conspiracy by the British government to strip the colonists of their liberty was underway. Ostensibly to raise revenue for the British treasury, the relatively small sums required by the Stamp Act made some colonists believe Parliament was attempting to set a precedent for unconstitutional, unlimited taxing. Another revenue act, the Townshend Duties, was passed in 1768 despite the violent reaction of colonists to the Stamp Act. Increasing numbers of customs officers were sent from Great Britain to the colonies: “placemen” whose dependence on those who appointed them extended the corrupt British ministerial influence. The independence of the judiciary was being weakened in America as well since judges in the colonies, as opposed to judges in England, were denied life tenure in their posts by the crown. The vice-admiralty courts, which took over much of the business of common law courts with juries, were composed of single judges appointed by royal governors, so these denied the colonists an aspect of constitutional protection. The career of English radical journalist John Wilkes, who was repeatedly denied a seat in Parliament after he was elected, further shattered any hope for the colonists that these evil events were only British missteps and strengthened their view that the corrupt British government had a sinister plan to subvert liberty. The sending of British troops to Boston in 1768, ostensibly to maintain order, stiffened colonial resistance because of their reading of “opposition” writers’ repeated warnings about the dangers of standing armies to liberty. After the passage of the Tea Act and the resulting Tea Party in 1773, Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774 confirmed colonists’ perception that there was a fixed plan to destroy the colonists’ constitutional rights.

The colonists’ belief that corruption in Britain caused these problems elevated their own cause to that of mankind’s cause: if the light of liberty had been extinguished in Britain, America would become the defender and preserver of liberty in an oppressed world. 

“A Note on Conspiracy”

The 18th century was an age of ideology, and that conspiratorial thinking was not confined only to the Revolutionary leaders in the colonies and the radical “opposition” writers in England but also shared by their British government opponents. The British officials were convinced there was a deliberate plan by a power-hungry group in the colonies to stir up trouble between America and Great Britain with the predetermined goal of separation from Britain despite protestations of loyalty to the crown. Progressive Era historians, such as Charles Beard, had “adopted unknowingly the Tory interpretation” (158) by dismissing the Revolutionary leaders’ sincere fear of the British government’s conspiratorial designs as mere propaganda to incite the colonial population to rebel and demand independence from Britain.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Transformation”

With their new conception of themselves as defenders of freedom for the world, Americans viewed their previous “defects” of remote primitiveness and simplicity as virtuous, contrasting with the Old World’s sophisticated corruption. European Enlightenment thinkers also perceived the American colonies as a special place of renewal with its inhabitants living in morality close to nature. During the decade of political controversy with Great Britain, the colonists “found a new world of political thought […] they touched its boundaries, and, at certain points, probed its interior” (161). The colonists’ scrutiny of traditional concepts was “part of the colonists’ efforts to express reality as they knew it, and to shape it to ideal ends” (161, which would have profound repercussions for Americans’ later drafting of government constitutions.

“Representation and Consent”

The question of representation was the first political issue in the Anglo-American crisis that was rapidly transformed by the colonists. The colonists’ different conception of representation was a crystallization of over a century of American political experience rather than the invention of a new condition. In medieval England, elected representatives in Parliament had been bound to the interests of their local communities. However, Parliament in the 18th century now was deemed to symbolize the interest of the entire nation. In the theory of “virtual representation,” the representatives spoke for all British subjects, not just the ones who had elected them. Due to colonial circumstances, the theory of representation in America had developed in the opposite direction, more like the medieval conception: the largely autonomous colonial towns bound their representatives to local interests. In the clash over Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, Americans rejected the validity of virtual representation, pointing out that the electors of Great Britain and the inhabitants of the colonies would not share the same consequences of any tax imposed by Parliament in America. Therefore, there was no identity of interests between the Parliament members and colonial Americans. The far-reaching implications of Americans’ consideration of these issues were that a representative assembly should be a mirror of the people represented and gained its authority by their continuous consent. Government would then be “by the people as well as for the people” (173).

“Constitution and Rights”

After 1765, Americans also transformed the traditional British definition of a constitution and the nature of the rights that constitutions existed to protect. The traditional British use of the word “constitution” signified the existing arrangement of government institutions, but under the pressure of the colonists’ need to distinguish principles from institutions during the Anglo-American crisis, a new idea emerged. Bailyn gives the example of colonial lawyer James Otis in a famous writs of assistance case in 1761 beginning to formulate the idea of a constitution as a set of fixed principles that placed a boundary on government actions. Otis was not intellectually or politically prepared to further develop this position, but later Revolutionary writers did. Bailyn describes two pamphlets in 1776 as “brilliant sparks thrown off by the clash of Revolutionary politics” that “lit up the final steps of the path that led directly to the first constitutions of the American states” (182). These pamphleteers argued that a constitution and an existing scheme of government were two separate things, with the constitution representing a higher authority that should be embodied in a written charter. The Revolutionary writers also emphasized that human rights derived from the laws of nature rather than a magistrate’s ruling. The peculiar colonial circumstances had prepared colonists for the concept of a written constitution limiting the actions of government. Written charters had been used as frames of government in the colonies for over a century, including the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and William Penn’s Frame of Government of Pennsylvania (1682).

“Sovereignty”

The most pivotal intellectual question the colonists faced was the issue of sovereignty, “the nature and location of the ultimate power in the state” (198). The American Revolution was fought over this issue and American thinkers departed most sharply from 18th-century political thought in their views. The colonists failed to persuade Parliament of their ideas, but their discussions prepared the way for a federalist system of government. Eighteenth-century theory contended that a single, indivisible, sovereign power existed in a state. In Great Britain, a sovereign Parliament, combining King, Lords, and Commons, had the power to compel obedience, including the right to tax. Existing circumstances in colonial America reflected the opposite of this constitutional theory of an undivided sovereign power. Parliament regulated some aspects of colonial American life, but provincial assemblies exercised the power of taxing and regulated all the other parts of American life. Colonists attempted to express in new constitutional language the reality of the arrangements they had known for over a century. Eventually, Revolutionary writers asserted that an empire was different from a nation, with Parliament sovereignty only on some issues and other lesser political bodies exercising sovereignty in specific spheres. Americans realized that government sovereignty could be beneficially divided among different levels of institutions in a federalist system, which would prevent the central government from amassing too much power.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Contagion of Liberty”

The Revolutionary thinkers’ reconceptualization of constitutional questions during the Anglo-American crisis continued as Americans began to organize the internal governments of the new states. In 1776 alone, eight states wrote and adopted new constitutions. The intellectual dynamism stimulated by these discussions “swept past boundaries few had set out to cross, into regions few had wished to enter” (232). The transformative effect of Revolutionary thought unexpectedly affected the institution of chattel slavery, the religious establishment, the development of democracy, and the long-held attitude of hierarchical deference.

“Slavery”

For 18th-century white Americans, the term “slavery” did not refer only to chattel slavery (the owning of human beings), but it also had a specific political meaning. Tyrannical governments who did actions, such as levying taxes, without consent destroyed the liberty of the people reducing them to the status of “slaves.” Over time, the contradiction of Revolutionary political leaders demanding freedom while withholding it from others became glaring. Although enlightened Southerners, such as Jefferson, knew slaveholding was wrong, they felt too economically dependent upon it to take immediate action to free slaves. In the Northern and middle colonies, however, Revolutionary ideas brought about some alteration in attitudes and behavior towards slaveholding. In 1775, Quakers, although not Revolutionary leaders, formed the first antislavery society. In 1776, the Continental Congress voted against the importation of slaves to the colonies.

“Establishment of Religion”

“[N]othing shows the protean, uncontrollable character of the Revolutionary movement more clearly” (246) than the unintended impact on the establishment of religion. Although the hodgepodge development of the colonies had resulted in the Church of England only being weakly established in some colonies, such as Virginia, and a nonconformist Congregational establishment in some colonies, such as Massachusetts, dissenters from these religions, including Baptist leader Isaac Backus, protested they were still being deprived of ecclesiastical liberty by having to pay taxes to support churches with which they disagreed. Political leaders, such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who had been demanding civil liberty, eventually worked for disestablishment, separating church and state, to permit religious liberty.

“The Democracy Unleashed”

For 18th-century Americans, England’s “mixed” constitution was the ideal, in which the powers of the three social orders—royalty, nobility, and the commons—balanced each other to protect the liberty of all. However, when Americans began drawing up their own constitutions, they lacked the class of nobility, which was based on inherited wealth and status. Debate over how to solve this constitutional problem was intensified by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), which argued that it was a fallacy that the British “mixed” constitution preserved liberty. Paine maintained that the character of the people preserved it, and he suggested that the new states create unicameral assemblies. Although John Adams approved Paine’s demand for independence from Great Britain, he feared Paine’s constitutional ideas. Without the balance of contending powers, the government would degenerate into democracy—a word associated in the 18th century with mob rule and civil disorder. In his Thoughts on Government (1776), Adams proposed a second chamber in the assembly. The idea of replacing the hereditary privileges of the nobility with knowledge and wisdom as qualifications for membership in this second chamber began moving the Americans away from balancing the abstract orders of society to balancing the branches of government. In the process of solving new problems, Americans would eventually create the separation of government powers and transform the concept of democracy in a national government.

“Whether Some Degree of Respect Be Not Always Due from Inferiors to Superiors”’

The American Revolution was not begun as a social revolution, yet it led to unintended changes in beliefs and attitudes, rapidly spreading “like a spark from one flammable area to another” (305). Americans in 1760 assumed that a healthy society had a hierarchical order, with expected deference to social superiors. However, after colonial presses repeatedly urged defiance to constituted authority during the crisis with Great Britain, questioning public authority and justifiable disobedience received new approbation. The emphasis on equal rights and the compact theory of government threatened the traditional hierarchical order, with more emphasis now on merit-based legitimacy and rulers being servants of the people.

Chapters 1-6 Analysis

Bailyn’s pathbreaking book provides an interpretative answer to the question of why the American Revolution occurred. Since 18th-century white Americans were not experiencing the depths of social misery and oppressive tyranny that typically drive societies to revolution, historians often have had difficulty accounting for the colonists’ rebellion. Many Loyalists argued that the colonists had little cause to initiate the American Revolution. In terms of objective social reality, the colonists in British America were freer and more prosperous than most people in the 18th century. Bailyn identifies an intellectual tradition, the writings of the 18th-century Commonwealthmen and Radical Whigs, that was previously overlooked by historians of the American Revolution but had greatly impacted the colonists’ perspective. Although Bailyn initially discovered this set of ideas by reading the pamphlets written during the Revolutionary era, he bolsters his argument by citing the widespread publication of Cato’s Letters in colonial newspapers (43) and the repetition of these ideas in private correspondence (114). There is both explicit evidence of this great “hinterland of belief” (44) and implicit evidence (45) in “the degree to which the pamphleteers quoted from, plagiarized, and modeled their writings on Cato’s Letters and The Independent Whig.”

Although Bailyn relies mainly on the patriots’ writings as evidence since this book portrays their worldview, he also supports his argument that the colonists’ ideology included a sincere belief in a conspiratorial design by the British government with excerpts from the publications of their opponents. Bailyn quotes from House of Lords resolutions, a statement from King George III, and the writings of royal officials in the colonies to demonstrate that the opponents of the American Revolution also saw the colonists’ actions in conspiratorial terms. Bailyn emphasizes that the 18th century was “an age of ideology; the beliefs and fear expressed on one side of the Revolutionary controversy were as sincere as those expressed on the other” (158). Since Progressive Era historians had tended to dismiss the Revolutionary leaders’ fear of conspiracy as mere propaganda to stir up people to rebel, these historians were unknowingly adopting the 18th-century British government’s interpretation of the colonists’ motives. Instead of including this “Note on Conspiracy” in the body of the chapter “The Logic of Rebellion,” Bailyn added this section because the belief of the opponents to the Revolution in a colonists’ conspiracy was “not in itself determinative of events” (150).

Bailyn also uses vivid imagery and metaphors to clarify his arguments and convince the reader of his interpretations. Bailyn uses the metaphor of “an intellectual switchboard” to convey his argument that the colonists saw the British government’s actions after 1763 through a configuration of ideas: “wired so that certain combinations of events would activate a distinct set of signals—danger signals, indicating […] the likely trajectory of events” (22-23). With this imagery, Bailyn emphasizes his point that “it was the meaning this view gave to the events of the time, and not simply the accumulation of grievances, that explains the origins of the American Revolution” (22). When Bailyn wants to convey the colonists’ intellectual advancements in political theory, he often uses imagery connected to physical exploration. For example, Bailyn asserts that in the creative period before independence, “explorations were made in new territories of thought, the first comprehensive maps sketched, and routes marked out” (21). In another example, Bailyn argues that during the decade of political controversy with Great Britain, the colonists “found a new world of political thought […] they touched its boundaries, and, at certain points, probed its interior” (161). To convey the contagiousness of the Revolutionary ideas of liberty, Bailyn uses the simile of a spark igniting: “Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went. Its greatest intensification took place in the explosive atmosphere of local religious dissent” (305). 

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