The creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

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NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

The Creation of the American Republic ’776-1787

A new science of politics is needed for a new world. —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, I

83 5

The Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williams¬ burg, Incorporated.

THE

CREATION OF THE

AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1776-1787 by GORDON S. WOOD

Published for the INSTITUTE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

at Williamsburg, Virginia, by THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS • CHAPEL HILL

Copyright © 1969 by The University of North Carolina Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 71-78861 Printed by Heritage Printers, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America

To My Mother and Father

128147

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/creationofamericOOOOwood

Joel Barlow, in his Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, published in 1792, suggested that what really separated the free from the oppressed of the world was simply a “habit of thinkingIndeed, said Barlow, the mind of man was “the only foundation" for any system of politics. Men never submitted to a king because he was stronger or wiser than they were, but because they believed him born to govern. And likewise men have become free and equal when they have thought they were so. When men asserted that nature had established inequalities among themselves, and thus had given to some the right of governing others, what they actually meant, said Barlow, was cultural nature, not physical. Therefore Aristotle was as right in teaching that some were born to command and others to be commanded as the French National Assembly was in de¬ claring that men were bom free and equal. What men believed, said Barlow, was what counted. A-lany “astonishing effects... are wrought in the world by the habit of thmkingA It was custom, mental familiarity, culture, not force, that supported social grada¬ tions and distinctions, and even tyranny itself. But “let the peo¬ ple have time to become thoroughly and soberly grounded in the doctrine of equality, and there is no danger of oppression either from government or from anarchy.” In the final analysis, con¬ cluded Barlow, it was the Americans’ habit of thinking “that all men are equal in their rights” which had created their Revolution and sustained their freedom. It was a profound insight, and one that I have attempted to exploit in this study of American political culture between 1776 and 1787. It was not, however, an insight with which I originally set out. I began simply with the intention of writing a mono¬ graphic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era; [vii]

[viii]

(

Preface

yet I soon found that I could make little or no sense of the various institutional or other devices written into the constitutions until I understood the assumptions from which the constitution-makers acted. I needed, in other words, to steep myself in the political literature of the period to the point where the often unspoken premises of thought became clear and explicit. What I discovered was much more than I anticipated; my reading opened up an in¬ tellectual world I had scarcely known existed. Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process—a set of common as¬ sumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlight¬ ened age. As I explored this pattern of beliefs, it became evident that many of the historiographical problems involved in interpreting the Revolution and the formation of the Constitution stemmed from a failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of the political culture in which the Revolutionary generation operated. The ap¬ proach of many historians to the American Revolution, it seemed, had too often been deeply ahistorical; there had been too little sense of the irretrievability and differentness of the eighteenthcentury world. Although the vocabulary of the period was famil¬ iar, I found the meaning of much of that vocabulary strange and peculiar, and I learned that words such as “liberty,” “democ¬ racy,” “virtue,” or “republicanism” did not possess a timeless application. Indeed, even within the very brief span of years that I was studying, it soon became clear that the terms and categories of political thought were undergoing rapid change, beset by the strongest kinds of polemical and experiential pressures. When I began to compare the debates surrounding the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 with those surrounding the forma¬ tion of the federal Constitution of 1787, I realized that a funda¬ mental transformation of political culture had taken place. The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had con¬ structed not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern. Of course this trans¬ formation of political thought had its origins deep in the colonial

Preface

[ix]

past; and the formation of the federal Constitution hardly marked the end of the advancement of American political ideas. Yet the decade of Revolutionary constitution-making seemed especially crucial and catalytic in the creation of a new conception of poli¬ tics. The quarrel with Britain in the i76o’s precipitated a com¬ prehensive examination of politics that easily blended into the Americans’ efforts to construct their new republican constitu¬ tions, as they attempted to put into practice the ideas the imperial debate had brought into focus. This need to institutionalize Amer¬ ican experience under the exigencies of a revolutionary situation had the effect of accelerating and telescoping intellectual devel¬ opments and of exposing the ambiguities and contradictions of American thought. By the 1780’s the way was prepared for a resolution of the problems of American politics in a new political theory—a task made possible by the demands of justifying the new federal Constitution. The result, clear to many Americans by 1790, was a truly original formulation of political assumptions and the creation of a distinctly American system of politics. To describe and explain this creation became the aim of the book. Of all the recent historians contributing to a renewed ap¬ preciation of the intellectual character of the American Revolu¬ tion none has been more important than Bernard Bailyn, and my debt to him is incalculable. I not only benefited from an early reading of his study of the ideological origins of the American Revolution, but I had the advantage of his penetrating criticism of my manuscript at the beginning stages of its preparation. Most important, however, I am grateful to him, as are many others, for making- early American history an exciting and vital field of study. Others—William W. Abbot, Daniel Boorstin, Richard Buel, Jr., W. Frank Craven, William W. Freehling, Wendell and Jane Garrett, Ira Gruber, Stephen G. Kurtz, Arthur Mann, Marise Rogge, and Robert J. Taylor—read the manuscript at various stages of its development, and I am greatly indebted to them for their discerning suggestions and criticisms. Two persons helped me in ways that they are perhaps not fully aware of: Donald Fleming offered encouragement at a crucial time, and Samuel E. Thorne gave me the benefit of his understanding of both English constitutional history and the nature of the historical process; I convey my gratitude to both of them. I am especially grateful to the Institute of Early American

[x]

Preface

History and Culture and in particular to its director, Lester J. Cappon, for providing me as a fellow of the Institute with both the time and the congenial atmosphere for completing the manu¬ script. Working with the staff of the Institute and sharing in its good cheer has been an invaluable personal experience that goes well beyond expert editorial assistance. To my wife, Louise, I owe the most of all, for she made the whole venture possible and worthwhile. GORDON S. WOOD

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Contents

Preface

vii

PART ONE:

Chapter 1.

The Whig Science of Politics

i

3

1.

History and Reason

2.

The English Constitution

10

Power against Liberty

i8

4».

English Corruption

28

5.

The Pattern of Tyranny

36

(6)

-

THE IDEOLOGY OF REVOLUTION

The Preservation of Principles

3

v

Chapter II. Republicanism

43 46

1.

A New People for a New World

46

2.

The Appeal

48

3.

The Public Good

53

4.

The Need

65

5.

Equality

70

6.

Whig Resentment

75

7.

The Pennsylvania Revolution

83

of

for

Antiquity Virtue

Chapter 111. Moral Reformation

91

The Easy Transition to Republicanism

91

2.

The Debate over the Genius of the People

93

3.

Republicans by Nature

97

4.

American Corruption

I>']

107

[xii]

Contents 5.

A Christian Sparta

i 14

6.

Republican Regeneration

i i8

PART TWO:

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATES

12 5

Chapter IV.

The Restructuring of Power

127

1.

$

Foundations for Freedom

127

2.

The Transformation of the Magistracy

i32

3.

The Power of Appointment

143

4.

Separation of Powers

150

Chapter V. -1.

The Nature of Representation

162

The Representative Legislature

162

2.

Virtual Representation

173

3.

The Explicitness of Consent

181

4.

Ambassadors to an Extraneous Power

188

Chapter VI. Mixed Government and Bicameralism

197

1.

The American Defense of the Mixed State

197

2.

Mixed Republics

202

The Senatorial Part of the Society

206

4.

Persons and Property

214

5.

Simple Democracy

222

6.

A Radical Experiment in Politics

226

7.

The Homogeneity of Orders

237

8.

A Double Representation of the People

244

^3.

PART THREE: THE PEOPLE AGAINST THE LEGISLATURES

Chapter VII. Law and Contracts 1.

257 259

Written and Unwritten Law

259

The Contract of Rulers and Ruled

268

The Constitution as Fundamental Law

273

4.

The Social Contract

282

5.

The Ambiguity of American Law

291

V2. Qv

Contents Chapter VIII.

306

1.

The Novelty of Constitutional Conventions

306

2.

The Deficiency of Conventions

310

3.

The People Out-of-Doors

319

4.

A Power Superior to the Ordinary Legislature 328

Chapter IX.

The Sovereignty of the People

344

1.

The Anglo-American Debate over Sovereignty 344

2.

The Articles of Confederation

354

3.

The Disintegration of Representation

363

4.

The Transferal of Sovereignty

372

5.

The Disembodiment of Government

383

PART FOUR: y

Conventions of the People

[xiii]

Chapter X.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD

Vices of the System

391 393

1.

The Incongruity of the Crisis

393

2.

The Perversion of Republicanism

396

3.

The Abuses of Legislative Power

403

4.

Democratic Despotism

409

5.

Political Pathology

413

6.

The Continuance of Hope

425

Chapter XL Republican Remedies

430

1.

Constitutional Reform

2.

Whiggism against Itself

438

The Revision of Separation of Powers

446

4.

The Enhancement of the Judiciary

453

5.

The Abandonment of the States

463

t-3.

PART FIVE:

Chapter XII.

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION

The Worthy against the Licentious

430

469

471

1.

The Federalist Revolution

471

2.

The Separation of Social and Political Authority

475

Contents

[xiv] 3.

Aristocracy and Democracy

483

4.

The Extended Sphere of Government

499

5.

The Filtration of Talent

506

Chapter XIII.

The Federalist Persuasion

1.

The Repudiation of 1776

519

2.

Consolidation or Confederation

524

3.

The Primal Power of the People

532

The Irrelevance of a Bill of Rights

536

THE Alliance of Power and Liberty

543

f 4.

7. (8.

The Checking and Balancing of Power

547

The Redefinition of Bicameralism

553

The Triumph and End of American Ideology

562

PART SIX:

THE RE VOLUTION ARY ACHIE VEMENT

Chapter XIV. The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams -a*

519

i>

The Ensnaring of the Enlightenment

£>i

No

^

The Balanced Constitution

4.

The Anomaly of the

p

An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy

Special Providence for Americans

567 567 569 574

Defence of the

Constitutions of the Government of the United States

Chapter XV.

565

580 587

The American Science of Politics

1.

Democratic Republics

593

2.

The Pervasiveness of Representation

596

3.

The Equation of Rulers and Ruled

600

4.

The Parceling of Power

602

The End of Classical Politics

606

0

A Note on Sources Select List of Full Titles Index

619 629

a7 r

PART ONE

The Ideology of Revolution

1 must indulge a hope that Britain's liberty, as well as ours, will eventually he preserved by the virtue of America. —JOSEPH WARREN, I 775

CHAPTER

/

The Whig Science of Politics

i. History and Reason

The American Revolution has always seemed to be an extra¬ ordinary kind of revolution, and no more so than to the Revolu¬ tionaries themselves. To those who took stock at the end of three decades of revolutionary activity, the Revolution was not “one of those events which strikes the public eye in the subversions of laws which have usually attended the revolutions of govern¬ ments.” Because it did not seem to have been a usual revolution, the sources of its force and its momentum appeared strangely un¬ accountable. “In other revolutions, the sword has been drawn by the arm of offended freedom, under an oppression that threatened the vital powers of society.”1 But this seemed hardly true of the American Revolution. There was none of the legendary tyranny of history that had so often driven desperate people into rebellion. The Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crush¬ ing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and hierarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century. To its victims, the Tories, the Revolution was truly incomprehensible. Never in history, said Daniel Leon¬ ard, had there been so much rebellion with so “little real cause.” It was, wrote Peter Oliver, “the most wanton and unnatural re¬ bellion that ever existed.” The Americans’ response was out of all proportion to the stimuli: “The Annals of no Country can proi. [William Vans Murray], Political Sketches, Inscribed to His Excellency John Adams (London, 1787), 21, 48.

[5]

[^]

Creation of the American Republic

duce an Instance of so virulent a Rebellion, of such implacable madness and Fury, originating from such trivial Causes, as those alledged by these unhappy People.” The objective social reality scarcely seemed capable of explaining a revolution.2 Yet no American doubted that there had been a revolution. How then was it to be justified and explained? If the American Revolution, lacking “those mad, tumultuous actions which dis¬ graced many of the great revolutions of antiquity,” was not a typical revolution, what kind of revolution was it? If the origin of the American Revolution lay not in the usual passions and in¬ terests of men, wherein did it lie? Those Americans who looked back at what they had been through could only marvel at the rationality and moderation, “supported by the energies of wellweighed choice,” involved in their separation from Britain, a revolution remarkably “without violence or convulsion.”3 It was, said Edmund Randolph, a revolution “without an immediate op¬ pression, without a cause depending so much on hasty feeling as theoretic reasoning.” It seemed in fact to be peculiarly “the result of reason.”! The Americans were fortunate in being bom at a time when the principles of government and freedom were better known than at any time in history^ By “reading and reasoning” on politics they had learned “how to define the rights of nature,—how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty,” how, in short, to discover and resist the forces of tyranny before they could be applied. “Justly it may be said, ‘the present is an age of philos¬ ophy, and America the empire of reason.’ ”4 As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons that the colonists’ intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive and sensitive about their liber2. [Daniel Leonard], The Origin of the American Contest with Great Britain . . . [by] Massachusettensis . . . (New York, 1775), 40; Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Re¬ bellion: A Tory View (San Marino, 1963), 159; Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776-1718 (San Marino, 1940), 46-47. 3. Simeon Baldwin, An Oration Pronounced before the Citizens of NewHaven, July 4th, 1788 . .. (New Haven, 1788), 10; [Murray], Political Sketches, 48; David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1789), I, 350. 4. Edmund Randolph, MS History of Virginia, quoted in Kate M. Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1724-1792 (N.Y., 1892), I, 123; William Pierce, An Oration, Delivered at Christ Church, Savannah, on the 4th of July, 1788 . . (Savannah, [1788]), 8, 6; Enos Hitchcock, An Oration; Delivered July 4th, 1788 . . . (Providence, [1788]), 14.

Whig Science of Politics

[J]

ties. Where the people of other countries had invoked principles only after they had endured “an actual grievance,” the Ameri¬ cans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles even before they actually suffered. “They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” The crucial question in the colonists’ minds, wrote John Dickinson in 1768, was “not, what evil has actually attended particular measures—but, what evil, in the na¬ ture of things, is likely to attend them.” Because “nations, in gen¬ eral, are not apt to think until they feel, . . . therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.” But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were an “enlightened people” who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt.5 From the outset the colonists attempted to turn their decadelong controversy with England into a vast exercise in the de¬ ciphering and applying of the philosophy of the age. By 1768 they knew that “never was there a People whom it more im¬ mediately concerned to search into the Nature and Extent of their Rights and Privileges than it does the People of America at this Day.”6 7 Believing with the age that “the actions and affairs of men are subject to as regular and uniform laws, as other events,” and that “the laws of Mechanics apply in Politics as well as in Philosophy,’Jtthey sought constantly to recur to those first prin¬ ciples that overlay the workings of politics, agreeing with young Alexander Hamilton that “the best way of determining disputes, and of investigating truth is by ascending to elementary prin¬ * ciples.”^ They implored each other to “let a regard to our liberties and privileges more and more prevail,” urged each other to in5. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies,” Mar. 22, 1775, The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, rev. ed. (Boston, 1865-66), II, 125; [John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Phila., 1768) in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Life and Writings of John Dickinson (Historical So¬ ciety of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, 14 [Phila., 1895]), 392, 389; [Guillaume Thomas Frangois Raynal], The Sentiments of a Foreigner on the Disputes of GreatBritain with America (Phila., 1775), 22-23. 6. Quoted in Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (N. Y., 1953), 362. 7. Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont . . . (Wal¬ pole, N. H., 1794), xi; Charleston South Carolina Gazette, June 3, 1774; [Alex¬ ander Hamilton], The Farmer Refuted . . . (N. Y., 1775), in Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (N. Y., 1961-), 1,96.

[6]

Creation of the Atnerican Republic

quire into “matters of power and of right, that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction.”8 The resjjltjwas phenomenal: an outpouring of political writ¬ ings—pamphlets, letters, articles, sermons—that has never been -=>equaled in the nation’s history. It was as if “every order and de¬ gree among the people” had heeded John Adams’s urgent appeal to “become attentive to the grounds and principles of govern¬ ment.” To those who watched the flood of Whig literature with increasing apprehension it seemed that “almost every American pen” was at work. Even “peasants and their housewives in every part of the land” had begun “to dispute on politics and positively to determine upon our liberties.” True Whigs, however, were hardly surprised at the prevalence of political interest, for they were coming to see that the stakes were high indeed. If the prin¬ ciples of politics could be comprehended by the people, if “the science of man and society, being the most extended in its nature, and the most important in its consequences, of any in the circle of erudition,” were made the “object of universal attention and A study,” then, wrote Josiah Quincy in 1774, the rights and happi¬ ness of man would no longer remain buried “under systems of civil and priestly hierarchy.”9 Because the Americans sought nothing less than “a compre¬ hensive knowledge of history and of mankind” and believed that if they were successfully to resist tyranny “they ought to be well versed in all the various governments of ancient and modern states,” it is not surprising that the intellectual sources of their Revolutionary thought were profuse and various. “Let us study I the law of nature,” said John Adams; “search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; con¬ template the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us : the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers.”10 History was the most obvious source of 8. Boston Gazette, Mar. 9, 1767; [John Adams], “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (1765), in Charles F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (Boston, 1850-56), III, 463. 9. [Adams], “Dissertation,” Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, III, 462; New-York Journal, Oct. 30, 1766; Josiah Quincy, Jr., Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the . . . Boston Port Bill . . . (Boston, 1774), in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts': l144~l115 (Boston, 1874), 325-26. 10. Sentinel [pseud.l, To the Inhabitants of the City and County of NewYork, Apr. i3, i776 (N. Y., 1776); [Adams], “Dissertation,” Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, III, 462.

Whig Science of Politics

[?]

information, for they knew that they must “judge of the future” by the past. “Happy are the men, and happy the people, who grow wise by the misfortunes of others.”11 The writings of classi¬ cal antiquity, as Josiah Quincy told his son, were especially “ele¬ gant and instructive,” for in the histories of the ancient world they would “imbue a just hatred of tyranny and zeal for free¬ dom.”12 Naturally the history of England was most important for the colonists, for, as Dickinson said, it “abounds with instances” of how a people had protected their liberties against their rulers.13 Mingled with their historical citations were repeated referencesxa the natural-law writings of Enlightenment philosophers and the ^ common-law writings of English jurists—both contributing to a" more obviously rational, rather than an experiential, understand¬ ing of the nature of politics. And for those who continued to confront the world in religious terms the revelations of scripture and the mandates of covenant theology possessed a special force that scarcely contradicted but instead supplemented the knowl¬ edge about society reached through the use of history and reason. It seemed indeed to be a peculiar moment in history when all knowledge coincided, when classical antiquity, Christian the¬ ology, English empiricism, and European rationalism could all be \ linked. Thus Josiah Quincy, like other Americans, could without ' any sense of incongruity cite Rousseau, Plutarch, Blackstone, and a seventeenth-century Puritan all on the same page.14 However imprecise, confused, and eclectic the colonists’ gleanings from history and quotations from philosophers may seem to us, they represented to eighteenth-century Americans rr. Rind’s Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, Aug. 25, 1774; [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer, Ford, ed.. Writings of Dickinson, 375. 12. Quincy quoted in Charles F. Mullet, “Classical Influences on the Ameri¬ can Revolution,” Classical Journal, 35 (1939-40), 102; Rind’s Wmsbg. Va. Gazette, Mar. 3, 1768, quoted in John C. Miller, The Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 1943), 169. 13. [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer, Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson, 365. On history in the 18th century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitu¬ tion and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, Eng., 1957), 231-32, 246-50; R. N. Stromberg, “History in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), 295-304; Herbert Davis, “The Augustan Conception of History,” in J. A. Mazzeo, ed„ Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600—1800 (N. Y., 1962), 213-29; H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1965); Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Historical Philosophy of the Enlighten¬ ment,” in Theodore Besterman, ed., Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 27 (1963), 1667-87. 14. Quincy, Observations on the Boston Port Bill, Quincy, Memoir, 329.

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