The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

“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 constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.”

Bailyn distinguishes the American Revolution from the later French and Russian Revolutions, which attempted to overthrow “the existing social order.” The American Revolution was precipitated by a system of ideas that gave a specific meaning to the colonies’ accumulation of grievances against the British government. This distinctive ideology was focused on the preservation of political liberty, not the alteration of the social order; therefore, the Revolutionary pamphlets were rational and explanatory of constitutional principles.

“The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought.”

Although classical literature was commonly cited in the Revolutionary pamphlets, Bailyn argues that these examples were illustrative, not the primary source of the colonists’ determination to engage in the American Revolution and achieve independence from Great Britain. The classics of the ancient world were only one of several influences on the colonists’ thought, including English common law, religious beliefs, and Enlightenment ideas. Bailyn asserts that the most significant influence on the Revolutionary movement was the Commonwealth tradition.

“Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.”

Bailyn describes the writings of the Commonwealthmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, which he argues “shaped the mind of the American Revolutionary generation” (35). These radical British “opposition” reformers viewed Prime Minister Walpole as corrupting Parliament with bribes as well as corrupting the people who elected the legislative members. These writers were associated with the “Country” political movement that opposed the concentration of power by the “Court” Party in London and warned of the danger of standing armies and the corruption that would destroy liberty.

“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.”

Bailyn analyzes the ideology that provided the framework of meaning for the colonists. Most of the colonists’ theory of politics was articulated by earlier British writers of the Commonwealth tradition. This theory emphasized the tendency of power “to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries” (56), so that expansion must be resisted.

“What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.”

Bailyn uses the metaphor of power as an aggressive predator with liberty as its prey to convey the colonists’ conception of the threat that unchecked power poses to liberty. The colonists, therefore, emphasized the necessity of the people’s vigilance to defend liberty.

“What made it so, what turned power into a malignant force, was not its own nature so much as the nature of man—his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.”

The colonists believed in a legitimate power of government created by voluntary social compacts. However, the colonists’ view of human nature deemed mankind generally incapable of withstanding the lust for power, so only counterbalancing power could preserve liberty.

“Conceiving of liberty, then, as the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, of natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom, the colonists saw in the balance of powers of the British constitution ‘a system of consummate wisdom’ that produced an effective ‘check upon the power to oppress.’”

The colonists believed that mankind’s natural, inalienable rights were God-given, so no laws could ever wholly specify “the great treasury of human rights” (78). Laws merely “marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right” (78). The colonists believed that the British “mixed” constitution effectively balanced powers to protect liberty.

“The historical phasing of the defense of liberty in England was a matter of great importance to the colonists not merely because it illustrated the characteristic dangers liberty faced but also because it made clear 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 that established feudal tyranny. The Magna Carta and later safeguards were developed against tyranny until the 17th-century struggle against the Stuarts. Since this struggle had led to the settlement of America by people escaping temporal and spiritual tyranny, the colonists believed Americans had a special role in protecting liberty.

“They saw in the measures taken by the British government and in the actions of officials in the 1 something for which their peculiar inheritance of thought had prepared them only too well, something they had long conceived to be a possibility in view of the known tendencies of history and of the present state of affairs in England.”

The thesis of Bailyn’s book is that the American Revolution was brought about by the framework of meaning through which the colonists viewed their accumulation of grievances against the British government. Their system of ideas from the Commonwealth tradition emphasized that nations in history lost their liberty when their governments became corrupt. The colonists viewed the present British government as corrupt and, therefore, deliberately conspiring to destroy their liberty.

“That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; but if they had not realized it themselves they would soon have discovered it from the flood of newspapers, pamphlets, and letters that poured in on them from opposition sources in England.”

After the British government passed the Coercive Acts in 1774, which included the Administration of Justice Act “aimed at crippling judicial processes […] by permitting trials to be held in England for offenses committed in Massachusetts” (119), the Revolutionary leaders had no doubt that there was a deliberate plan to enslave the colonies. In addition, the colonists were informed by “opposition” writers in England of the governmental corruption.

“The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.”

British governmental corruption was viewed through the Commonwealthmen pattern of ideas. Britain had been one of the last bastions of liberty in the world, and if “the light of liberty” was extinguished there, then America must be the asylum of freedom in the world, playing a special role in history. This conception transformed the colonists’ “constitutional arguments to expressions of a world regenerative creed” (138).

“The opponents of the Revolution—the administration itself—were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspiratorial designs.”

The 18th century was an age of ideology; both sides of the Anglo-American controversy had conspiracy beliefs. The British government was convinced that a secret, power-hungry group was conspiring to stir up trouble between the mother country and the colonies, professing loyalty while possessing a predetermined plan to separate from Great Britain. 

“It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.”

Bailyn refers here to the colonists’ ideology that America was one of the few remaining asylums of liberty in the world because of the colonists’ virtue. Consequently, the crisis in Anglo-American affairs was not just a provincial quarrel but a struggle of importance to the cause of freedom for the entire world. These beliefs gave vigorous force to the Revolutionary movement.

“What were once felt to be defects--isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state--could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal, and hope wherever they might be--in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.”

The colonial circumstances of primitiveness and simplicity were now seen by Americans as markers of virtue instead of defects, as contrasted with the Old-World corruption in the mother country. European Enlightenment thinkers around the world from “London coffeehouses” to “Parisian salons” also viewed the American colonies “as special preserves of virtue and liberty” (84), with its inhabitants living in morality close to nature.

“The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that had long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.”

Ideas of representation and consent in government had developed in the colonies in an opposite direction from practices in Great Britain. Due to colonial circumstances, such as the largely autonomous colonial towns, colonists expected to bind representatives to local interests, as in Massachusetts town meetings. Colonists, unlike residents of England, had “little reason to identify their interests with those of the central government” (164).

“In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.”

The colonists’ political experience had led to different expectations of representation than in England. For the colonists, the practice of “virtual” representation (the British Parliament spoke for all British subjects) made no sense, since their representation was tied to local interests. The electors and representatives in Britain shared intimate interests, but the British Parliament members and the inhabitants of the colonies would not share the same consequences of any taxation imposed in America.

“In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.”

The view of representation that was developing in America emphasized that government should be an accurate mirror of the people with ongoing consent. Bailyn argues that these changing ideas were transforming government into “by the people as well as for the people” (173).

“The primary function of a 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.”

American thinkers began to distinguish the traditional idea of a constitution as the existing arrangement of government institutions from some higher authority outlining the boundaries of government powers. As these theorists separated principles from institutions, they decided these principles should be embodied in a written charter for permanence.

“But the federalist tradition, born in the colonists’ efforts to state in constitutional language the qualification of Parliament’s authority they had known—to comprehend, systematize, and generalize the unplanned circumstance of colonial life—nevertheless survived, and remains, to justify the distribution of absolute power among governments no one of which can claim to be total, and so keep the central government from amassing ‘a degree of energy, in order to sustain itself, dangerous to the liberties of the people.’”

The traditional 18th-century understanding of sovereignty was an indivisible, supreme power in government. Bailyn argues that the origin of federalism was the reality of the colonists’ experience of a divided governmental sovereignty between the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies, which had sovereign powers in their different spheres.

“Up and down the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men--intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant--gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.”

Bailyn utilizes imagery—“the sparsely settled coast” and the “groups of men—intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant”—to convey the range of men involved in the important work of reinventing government despite the remoteness of the colonies and their relatively small population. Bailyn emphasizes the continuities between the Revolutionary debate on the constitutional questions of imperial relations and the organization of the new states’ internal governments by 1776.

“The identification between the cause of the colonies and the cause of the Negroes bound in chattel slavery—an identification built into the very language of politics—became inescapable.”

The term “slavery” was not used only to refer to chattel slavery (the owning of human beings) in the 18th century, but it also had a specific political meaning: Tyrannical governments who destroyed the liberty of the people reduced them to the status of “slaves.” Revolutionary writers routinely argued that if they were taxed without their consent, they would be “slaves.” Over time, the contradiction of Revolutionary political leaders demanding freedom while owning enslaved Black people became glaring in America and eventually brought about some alteration in attitudes and behavior.

“It had long been known that the balance of social forces in the colonial polities were peculiarly skewed, for one of the basic components did not exist in proper form.”

For 18th-century Americans, England’s “mixed” constitution was the ideal—the powers of the three social orders, royalty, nobility, and the commons, balanced each other to protect the liberty of all. Americans’ lack of nobility eventually pushed them to new, creative solutions, such as a merit-based second chamber in the legislature, and away from balancing the abstract orders of society to balancing the branches of government.

“Republics had always been known to be delicate polities, peculiarly susceptible to inner convulsions and outer pressures.”

Bailyn describes the colonists’ historical understanding of a republic as a form of government not suitable for large territories, which were best governed by a monarchy. The ancient republics of Athens and Rome had been small, and the colonists were uncertain whether this form of government could be stable over a territory the size of colonial America.