CHAPTER XIII. THE REVOLUTION IN 1776.
Revolt from aristocracy and detestation of “caste” in politics, in religion, and in society, have been the key-notes of the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. They were the incentives that first led men of that race to seek homes beyond the Atlantic, and have ever been the cardinal principles of the nation those pioneers founded.
The westward movement began with that era of English history marked by the intolerable pretensions, in matters both of Church and State, of the Stuart monarchs. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” which cost Charles I. his head, was, with all that it meant, the grievance that drove from England the settlers of the American colonies.
When James I., soon after his accession, was petitioned to allow liberty of assembling and of discussion to all classes and sects of his subjects, he replied that such a privilege “agrees with monarchy as well as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say: ‘It must be thus;’ then Dick shall reply and say: ‘Nay, marry, but we will have it thus;’ and, therefore, here I must say: ‘The king forbids.’”
The king forbade, but the native spirit of English liberty did not acquiesce without a murmur. There were mutterings of the storm that was to burst upon his son and successor in the full fury of rebellion. The subservient Wentworth complained that “the very genius of this nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”
Most outspoken in opposition to royal encroachment were the Puritans—those stern disciples of Calvin, who had furnished England her first Protestant martyrs, Hooper and Rogers, and who, in the early seventeenth century, were, as Hallam says, “the depositories of the sacred fire of liberty.”
Many Puritans preferred to leave their native country rather than submit. In 1607, a company of them were about to take sail for Holland from the Humber, when they were arrested and forced to return to their homes. In the following spring, they again attempted to escape. They reached the Lincolnshire coast, and were embarking, when soldiers, who had been dispatched in pursuit, rode down to the shore, and seized some of the women and children. As the only fault of these prisoners was that they had followed their husbands and fathers, they were afterward released.
The fugitives, whose leaders were John Robinson, their minister, and William Brewster, their ruling elder, first tarried at Amsterdam, and the next year settled at Leyden. There they lived for eleven years—a body of exiles, who did not fraternize with their Dutch neighbors, and who gradually formed a plan of migrating to the new country beyond the Atlantic, where they might be under their old flag, and yet hope for civil and religious liberty.
In 1617, they sent two of their number to England, to secure for their project the consent of the London Company, to which James I. had granted proprietary rights over Virginia—then the general name of the North American coast. The two embassies received a permit, although they put no great trust in it. “If,” said they, “there should afterward be a purpose to wrong us, though we had a seal as broad as the house floor, there would be means enough found to recall or reverse.” They did not foresee their future strength against oppression.
Thus it was that in the August of 1620 the Pilgrims set sail from Delft Haven, and in November landed on the shores of Massachusetts—forty-one families, numbering in all a hundred and two souls. Before they landed, they signed a mutual agreement, covenanting “to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony.” The agreement was loyally kept in the face of hardship and danger from within and without. The colony they planted grew in the spirit of popular liberty as it grew from penury to prosperity.
Bancroft remarks that “in the early history of the United States, popular assemblies burst everywhere into life, with a consciousness of their importance and immediate efficiency.” This development of freedom was attained in Virginia even earlier than in Massachusetts.
Virginia’s first struggle against usurping pretension was in 1624, when James I. sent out royal commissioners with orders “to enquire into the state of the plantation.” The colonists protested against the commissioners’ proposal of absolute governors, and demanded the liberty of their Assembly; “for nothing,” they said, “can conduce more to the public satisfaction and public utility.” And the Assembly succeeded in retaining its rights.
Thirty years later, a domestic attempt at usurpation was met with equal firmness. Samuel Cotton, the elected governor of the colony, had a quarrel with the Assembly, and arbitrarily proclaimed it dissolved. The representative defied his authority, and speedily forced him to yield. For even in that colony in America, where existed more of the inclination to class distinction than in many other of the colonies, the same spirit of hatred to “caste,” and the exercise of any assumed superiority was deep-rooted, and thus early gave evidence of its presence.
At the foundation of Virginia’s sister colony of Maryland, the king expressly covenanted that neither he nor his successors would lay any imposition, custom, or tax upon the inhabitants of the province. The proprietors had the right to establish a colonial aristocracy, but it was never exercised. “Feudal institutions,” says Bancroft, “could not be perpetuated in the lands of their origin, far less renew their youth in America. Sooner might the oldest oaks in Windsor forest be transplanted across the Atlantic, than antiquated social forms. The seeds of popular liberty, contained in the charter, would find in the New World the soil best suited to quicken them.” One of the early acts of the Provincial Assembly of Maryland was the framing of a declaration of rights. And yet, it was in Baltimore, the metropolis of the State of Maryland, that the first resistance was offered to the soldiers of the people, who were going to enforce the will of the majority upon the minority. Maryland, while, from proximity to the Federal capital, was less inclined toward the secession movement, was still sufficiently influenced by the aristocratic slave-holding part of her population as to be the scene of the first actual resistance to the will of the people in 1861.
The same spirit animated the pioneers of Connecticut, where Hooker declared that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” When John Clark and William Coddington founded the settlement of Newport, it was “unanimously agreed upon” among their people that the body politic should be “a Democracie or popular government.” The colonization of Pennsylvania—“the holy experiment,” as Penn called it—was inaugurated by its great leader with a solemn pledge of “liberty of conscience and civil freedom.” And similar incidents accompanied the birth of nearly every new colony.
As Massachusetts grew to be the most prosperous of the northern colonies, she “echoed the voice of Virginia like deep calling unto deep. The State was filled with the hum of village politicians; the freemen of every town on the Bay were busily inquiring into their liberties and privileges.” [Bancroft.] The American spirit, which was to leaven the world with a new ideal of liberty, found its philosophers and statesmen in the farms and hamlets of the young and simple community. It found, of course, its critics and its doubters. Lechford, a Boston lawyer, prophesied that “elections cannot be safe long here,” where manhood suffrage was the rule. John Cotton spoke against the accepted principle of rotation in office; but neither could stem the current of democratic doctrine, because the early settlers of America still retained the scars of their recent conflict with the aristocrats of Europe. Their arrival in the then wilderness of America had been too recent to obliterate the impression made on their minds by “caste” in Europe.
In 1635, there was a short-lived possibility that the aristocratic system of Britain might be transplanted to Massachusetts. Henry Vane, younger son of a titled English family, emigrated to the colony, where he was kindly received, and elected governor a few years after; and two noblemen, Lord Brooke and Lord Say-and-Seal, expressed their intention to follow him if the colonists would agree to establish a second chamber of their legislature and constitute them hereditary members of it. But the burgesses, easily perceiving the trend of such a proposal, declined it, courteously but decidedly.
Aristocracy never found a foothold in any of the colonies. The only approach to it was the privileges accorded in some of them to the “proprietors,” and these were, while they lasted, regarded with some jealousy. For instance, when Pennsylvania, after Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne, decided to raise £50,000 for self-defence by an estate tax, the proprietors—heirs of William Penn—claimed exemption from the levy; but, though Governor Morris approved the claim, the Assembly refused it.
Bancroft thus characterizes the elemental beginnings of the American nation: “Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, self-confident and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored its culture and happiness—alone broke away from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our Republic.” And periodically, as we see from the records of our nation, the might of the majority has been exercised to suppress anything like the attempted institution of “caste” in our country. This often-recurring crime begins to upraise its head, slowly at first, after each defeat, but eventually its growth becomes sufficiently great to attract the attention of the “Common People,” and, as a result, receives its punishment, so justly due.
And the same historian adds: “Of the nations of Europe, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence. The immense majority of American families were not of ‘the high folk of Normandie,’ but were of ‘the low men,’ who were Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the South.”
It is true of the South, in spite of the fact—influential throughout the history of that section—that its population contained an element drawn from the wealthier classes of the mother country. It has indeed been said that Virginia was “a continuation of English society.” The seeds of privilege may have existed in the Old Dominion, but, nevertheless, in no colony was the spirit of personal independence more signally evinced. “With consistent firmness of character,” to quote again from Bancroft, “the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles that prevailed in their forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.”
With the aims of the English rebellion against Charles I., the American colonies were in full sympathy. Immediately after its outbreak, the general court of Massachusetts directed the governor to omit the oath of allegiance to the king, “seeing that he had violated the privileges of Parliament.” But the civil war had no effect upon the colonial governments. In England, the monarchy, the peerage, and the prelacy were at swords’ points with the people; in America, there was neither peerage nor prelacy, and monarchy was rendered remote by the Atlantic, so that there were no two parties to join battle.
The Restoration opened a new era in the history of the colonies—a period of conflict between royal usurpation and aristocratic oppression on the one hand, and popular liberties on the other; a period that, after many years of difficulty and struggle, culminated in events that gave rationality and independence to the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.
It was a period marked in England by the political ascendency of the aristocracy. At the Restoration, the nobility resumed possession of the hereditary branch of the Parliament. Through their influence over elections, they, to a great extent, controlled the House of Commons—and through it the crown, over which the Commons had given recent and striking proofs of power. It was the aristocratic element that dictated the policy which goaded the colonies into secession from the mother country. It supplied the office-holders—“carpet-baggers” they might have been termed in modern political slang—whom the home government quartered upon the colonials by an official system tainted with nepotism and corruption. Its foe—Pitt, the great Commoner—was the friend of America, and one of her few champions in Parliament.
Equally the friend of America was the English democracy—politically far less powerful during the century after the Restoration than in the preceding and the subsequent periods. When the hated Stamp Act was repealed, the “Common People” of London lit bonfires and illuminated the streets, rang the historic Bow Bells, and decked the shipping in the Thames with flags.
But the House of Commons, before whom came the critical measures of legislation for the colonies, reflected the feeling of the aristocracy and not that of the populace. “The majority,” said a member, during a debate on American affairs in 1770, “is no better than an ignorant multitude.” Sir George Saville, a man of rare independence and integrity, replied in strong words. “The greatest evil that can befall this nation,” he declared, “is the invasion of the people’s rights by the authority of this house. I do not say that the members have sold the rights of their constituents; but I do say, I have said, and I shall always say, that they have betrayed them.” But his protest was shouted down as treason, and Parliament blindly pursued its course of usurpation.
Long before that time, there had been in America thoughts of independence as a refuge from usurpation. The colonists cherished a genuine loyalty to the old flag, and a strong pride in the Saxon blood, whose latest and, indeed, most typical product they themselves were. Yet, as far back as 1638, when Charles I. tried to revoke the original patent of Massachusetts, the settlers threatened to “confederate themselves under a new government for their necessary safety and subsistence.”
In 1698, Governor Nicholson, of Virginia, reported that “a great many in the plantations think that no law of England ought to be in force and binding upon them without their own consent.” Three years later, a public document noted that “the independence the colonies thirst after is now notorious.”
The sentiment grew gradually during the reigns of the Georges, slowly overcoming the strength of the old attachment to the mother country. Every encroachment attempted by royalty or officialism aroused a hostility that reinforced the spirit of liberty. For instance, when Samuel Shute, Governor of Massachusetts in 1719, tried to prevent the publication of the Assembly’s answer to one of his speeches, claiming power over the press as his prerogative, he only succeeded in evoking a vigorous resistance, that finally disposed of his pretension, and gave the press untrammeled freedom.
And thus it was that a generation later the patriotic Otis, of Boston, the man “who dared to love his country and be poor,” spoke so boldly in reply to Hutchinson, who summed up his aristocratic preferences in the odious Horatian maxim, Odi profanum vulgus, and who avowed his dissatisfaction that “liberty and property should be enjoyed by the vulgar.”
“God made all men naturally equal,” said Otis. “The ideas of earthly grandeur are acquired, not innate. No government has a right to make a slave of the subject.” And again, “to bring the powers of all into the hands of one or some few, and to make them hereditary, is the interested work of the weak and wicked.”
Such was the philosophy that was daily preached among the burghers of Boston. Such was the doctrine that Patrick Henry came from the Virginia backwoods to voice with his burning eloquence. Such was the spirit that was everywhere animating the colonies, while Parliament enacted one unjust and oppressive law after another. “The sun of American liberty has set,” Ben Franklin wrote from Europe to a friend in America, when he heard of the enactment of the ill-fated Stamp Act; “now we must light the torches of industry and economy.” “Be assured that we shall light torches of another sort,” replied his friend.
The torches were lit; they blazed forth in the shots fired at Lexington, and on Bunker Hill, and in the Declaration of Independence, at Philadelphia; and they were not put out until Parliamentary oppression had been forever ended, and a new nation—a plebeian democracy—took its place by the side of the proudest of earth’s empires.
The war was fought and won by the “Common People,” in the face of the armed force of the foreigner, and the treachery, active or passive, of not a few colonists, whose aristocratic connections or pretensions held them aloof from the movement for liberty. Even in the darkest days of the struggle, when Washington, driven from New York, was retreating before Howe’s advance, and many men of prominence were giving up the patriotic cause as hopeless—Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, of Pennsylvania, Samuel Tucker, of New Jersey, John Dickinson, of Delaware, and others—even then the Commander’s wonderful faith and courage was reflected in the fidelity of the populace. That alone made possible the final triumph.
“When the war of independence was terminated,” remarks DeTocqueville, in his famous study of “Democracy in America,” “and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions—two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met with under different forms and various names, in all free communities—the one tending to limit, the other to extend, indefinitely, the power of the people. The conflict between these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in America which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. Both parties were agreed on the most essential points, and neither of them had to destroy an old constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order to triumph. In neither of them, consequently, were a great number of private interests affected by success or defeat; but moral principles of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence, were concerned in the struggle, and these sufficed to kindle violent passions.”
The party that sought to limit the power of the people was that of the Federalists; its opponents took the name of Republican, which afterwards became Democratic-Republican, and finally, under Andrew Jackson, Democratic. In view of the fixed bent of the American national character, it is not difficult to discern the inevitable result of the conflict between them. The Federalists were certain to be ultimately overcome. America is the land of democracy, and the anti-democratic partisans were always in a minority.
Thus for the brief period succeeding the Civil War, while the wounds of the conflict were still fresh upon the body politic, the party of the aristocracy—for such had the Republican party become—utilizing the soreness still existing as the result of the conflict, succeeded, by the clamor of sectionalism, in diverting the attention of the masses from the tendency towards social superiority and “caste,” which the continuance of the Republican party in power was creating.
This brief ascendency during the first twelve years of the republic was due to several temporary causes. Most of the great leaders of the war for independence believed in a strong, centralized government, and therefore ranked themselves with the Federalists. The failure of the first attempt at federal control—the Continental Congress—and the local disorders that arose after the war, had inspired the people with a dread of anarchy. They were willing to accept, for a time, restrictive political theories, which it soon became safe to throw off.
The Federalist leaders were more than suspected of aristocratic tendencies. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, declared in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that “the ills of the country come from an excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue,” he added, as if in apology, “but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
Sherman, of Connecticut, said at the same time and place that “the people should have as little to do directly with the government as possible.”
John Adams repeatedly advocated, in his writings “a liberal use of titles and ceremonials for those in office,” and the establishment of an upper legislative chamber to be filled by “the rich, the well-born, and the able.” The words, “well-born,” gave intense offence. Their inconsistency with the grand democracy of the Declaration of Independence was bitterly commented on. The whole Federalist party was sarcastically called “the well-born”—a fatal appellation!
The expression “well-bred,” as describing the commander of the Pennsylvania militia at Homestead, will be recalled by the mass of the people long after every vestige of the militia’s visit to Homestead has departed. To the American mind such expressions as “well-born” and “well-bred” present an absurd attempt at class distinction.
Hamilton shared the same theories. He was openly accused by Jefferson, while both men were members of Washington’s cabinet, of a desire to overthrow the republic. He was closely connected with the rising financial power of New York. The people, while they admired his able and amiable personality, never quite forgave him for the part he took in defending one Holt, a rich Tory of New York, in a suit for redress brought by a poor widow whose house he had seized during the British occupation.
George Washington himself, who was a Federalist so far as he belonged to any party, was a man of ceremony and hauteur. He never forgot that he had descended from a titled English family, and belonged to the wealthiest class of Southern landed proprietors. When he assumed the Presidency, he established an almost courtly etiquette. On Tuesdays and Fridays he gave stately receptions to visitors; on Thursdays, Congressional dinners. While New York was the Capital of the Union, he had a Presidential box at the theatre (the only theatre the city then boasted), elaborately decorated, and whenever he occupied it, the orchestra played the “Presidential March” (now known as “Hail Columbia”).
At his inauguration, the House of Representatives addressed him simply as “President.” The Senate, probably cognizant of his personal wishes, sought a more high-sounding title. “His Excellency” was rejected as too plain, and after some debate the Senators decided upon “His Highness, the President of the United States, and Protector of their Liberties.”
The Senate’s suggestion was referred to the House, where it aroused no little opposition. Congressman Tucker, of South Carolina, inquired: “Will it not alarm our fellow-citizens? Will they not say that they have been deceived by the Convention that framed the Constitution? One of its warmest advocates—nay, one of its framers—has recommended it by calling it a pure democracy. Does giving titles look like a pure democracy? Surely not. Some one has said that to give dignity to our government we must give a lofty title to our chief magistrate. If so, then to make our dignity complete, we must give first a high title, then an embroidered robe, then a princely equipage, and finally a crown and hereditary succession. This spirit of imitation, sir, this spirit of mimicry and apery, will be the ruin of our country. Instead of giving us dignity in the eyes of foreigners, it will expose us to be laughed at as apes.”
So decided was the feeling of the House against the adoption of a sonorous title for the chief executive, that the Senate’s proposal was dropped. Nevertheless, a more elaborate ceremonial was maintained at the Presidential mansion—at first in New York, then in Philadelphia, and finally at Washington—during the first twelve years of the government, than after Jefferson’s accession in 1801.
Washington’s two elections to the Presidency was the nation’s tribute to the splendid personal character and military record of the man who, above all others, gave it nationality. When he refused a third election, the honor went to John Adams, as his political heir, although the Federalists, whose candidate Adams was, had only a bare majority of the electoral college—seventy-one votes against sixty-eight for Jefferson. It was at that time the almost invariable rule for the electors to be chosen by the State Legislatures, not, as now, by a popular vote. Had the conflict between Adams and Jefferson been waged before the people at large, it is probable that the latter, the champion of advanced democracy, would have been successful.
John Adams was a man of decided aristocratic tendencies. He was the first American minister to England, and had spent ten years at the courts of Europe. He did not conceal his admiration for English institutions. While in London he wrote a “Defence of the American Constitution,” which proved to be a laudation of the British form of government rather than that of the United States. In his “Discourses on Davilla,” he advocated a powerful centralized executive and a system of titles. He was frequently charged with favoring a monarchy and a hereditary legislature like the House of Lords. His political opponents nicknamed him “the Duke of Braintree”—Braintree being the Massachusetts town where he lived.
Thus early in the existence of the nation was evident the detestation on the part of the people at any attempted introduction of “caste” in the country. The Stamp Act, and taxes, and unjust discrimination while truly expressed caused the revolution in 1776, were only supplemental causes. In the record of every colony will be found traces of the opposition to “caste,” and the strong objection that existed among the people to the introduction of class distinctions among them. While the immediate cause of the rebellion on the part of the colonies, the revolution, and consequent creation of a nation, may appear to be the resistance to the imposition of taxes and therefore a matter of pocketbook; still, beneath it all, the foundation upon which the strength and duration of the resistance to the British power rested, was the strong sentiment in the hearts of the early patriots, demanding equality, social as well as “equality before the law.” Our forefathers endured suffering at Valley Forge, not for the sake of the pocketbook, but because they had in their bosoms that ever-present sentiment of the Anglo-Saxon people, that all must be equal in every respect. It is rather a petty cause to assign for the revolution and the exhibition of heroism upon the part of the forefathers of the Americans—a matter of taxes.