American Heroes (30 page)

This seems to have satisfied the people of Watertown for the moment, but in truth the assistants were not like a parliament, for they were elected at large and did not represent particular districts or towns. Apparently this fact was quickly recognized, for two months later Winthrop recorded, “Every town chose two men to be at the next court, to advise with the governour and assistants about the raising of a public stock, so as what they should agree upon should bind all.” Two years later the freemen of the towns revoked the legislative power of the assistants and insisted that all laws be made in the General Court, which was now to include representatives (“deputies”) elected by the freemen of each town. Non-freemen still did not share in the election, just as the majority of Englishmen were excluded from voting for members of Parliament, but this defect seems not to have affected the viability of the fiction. What was needed was not that every man, woman, and child share in the choice of a representative but that the choice be perceived as that of a geographical community. A representative had to represent the people of a particular place; he ceased to represent when he lost his local identification. A representative assembly had to be
assembled
. It had to be composed from the parts of the whole. The fiction would collapse if it was stretched to have all representatives chosen by all voters, even in so small a society as Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. The local character of representation was present at the beginning in England as well as in England's colonies, and it has remained to this day essential to the credibility of the fiction.

Closely linked to the requirement that the representative be attached to a locality was a need that he be perceived as a subject of government. In order to represent other subjects he had to be himself a subject. The Massachusetts assistants, though annually elected and bound by the laws they enforced, were perceived as rulers, not ruled, just as the king and his appointed council, though bounded by law, were rulers, not ruled. King and council, governor and assistants, were there to exercise authority over the whole society, representatives were there to give the consent of their particular counties or towns or districts to what the rulers did. As we shall see, the distinction began to blur very early, but it remained an essential ingredient in the fiction of representation and in the way people thought about government. In Massachusetts the Reverend John Cotton, who was by no means simpleminded, thought that a political system that confounded rulers and ruled—that is, a democracy—was a contradiction in terms. “If the people be governors,” he asked, “who shall be governed?” And in his view and John Winthrop's the representatives of the people, the deputies whom the various towns sent to the Massachusetts General Court after 1634, were subjects, mere substitutes for the people who chose them. Like the first representatives whom the king summoned to Parliament, they assembled in order to bind their local constituents to obey the laws and pay the taxes agreed upon at the center. The very act of consent identified them as subjects, and the consent they gave was the consent of the particular localities that they represented.

If representatives had been, or had remained, mere subjects—if they had been merely the agents of their constituents, empowered only to consent for other subjects to measures propounded by the authority of a government of which they were not strictly speaking a part—then the fiction of representation would have been a much simpler and more plausible matter than it has ever in fact been. It is possible that in England the House of Commons continued for some time after its inauguration to be considered in the way that its members so often pretended to consider it, as a gathering of mere subjects, representing various communities of subjects throughout the land. But the representatives very quickly began to act like something more than mere subjects. Not content to give or withhold consent to measures presented to them by the king and his council, they concocted measures of their own, presenting them as petitions to the king, but nevertheless in effect making governmental policy, making laws. Already by 1530 laws were regularly enacted “by authority” of Parliament.

The representatives who sat in the Commons in the seventeenth century, still protesting that they were mere subjects, for a time in the 1640s assumed all powers of government to themselves. And after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 there was no longer even the pretense that representatives were mere subjects. They were subjects, yes, but not mere subjects. If there was any doubt, the Revolution of 1688 resolved it.

Similarly, in the colonies, representative assemblies took the initiative in government almost from the beginning. In Maryland the free men and their proxies, even before representation was fully developed, did not wait for Lord Baltimore or his governor to present them with laws for passage: they made their own and presented them to him. In Massachusetts, once the General Court resumed legislative authority in 1634, there was no doubt that the representatives would share in that authority. But they went further. The General Court was the supreme judicial authority of the colony. Winthrop insisted that the deputies sent by the towns not share in this authority, because they were mere subjects; but the deputies demanded the right to sit in judgment on judicial matters, and they got their way. In Virginia the authority to make laws lay in the Virginia Company, resident in London, but the company called a representative assembly in the colony in 1619, and that assembly presented the company with a series of laws, which, with the company's approval, became the first laws enacted by a representative assembly in America.

As soon as representatives began to make laws and policy for the larger society to which their communities belonged, they did not cease to be subjects but they ceased to be
mere
subjects. By the same token, though they did not cease to be the agents of local communities, they ceased to be merely that. The laws they made were to bind not only their own communities but the whole realm, the whole nation, the whole society. In making policy for the larger body, they had to think in different terms from the needs and desires of their localities; sharing regal authority, they had to think regally, to think for the nation rather than the neighborhood. The well-being of the whole society might be different from that of any one part or even from that of the sum of all the parts. Insofar as they assumed authority and directed their attention to whatever they perceived as the welfare of the whole, representatives necessarily lost something of their character as subjects and as local agents and took on the trappings of a national aristocracy or ruling class.

Logically this meant a transformation in the meaning of representation, but chronologically, historically, it was not so much a transformation as a paradox or conflict present in representation from the beginning or almost from the beginning. It is quite likely that the persons selected by a community to represent it in Parliament were from the outset those who could command the assent of that community by virtue of their own local power and prestige. It is not impossible that the first representatives to the House of Commons were self-selected, without benefit of an election, as in effect a large percentage of members came to be or still were in the eighteenth century. And the local character of borough representatives in the Commons was already vitiated by the fourteenth century when nonresident country gentry began to buy and bully their way into possession of borough seats, elbowing out local but lesser dignitaries. A statute of 1413 required that a representative be a resident of the borough that chose him, but the lawyers in the House of Commons quickly interpreted this to mean that he need not be a resident of the borough that chose him.

As representatives assumed the mantle of authority, they stretched the fiction of representation to justify the attenuation of their ties to local constituencies. It may be counted as a step in this direction when they began, as early as the fourteenth century, to argue that they collectively represented the whole realm and could give the consent of every Englishman to what they did in Parliament. The English Parliament had never contained representatives from every town or village community. Though every county sent representatives, only selected boroughs were required or allowed to do so. But Sir Thomas Smith was able to state as a truism in 1583 that “everie Englishman is entended to bee there [in Parliament] present…. And the consent of the Parliament is taken for everie mans consent.”

From this premise it was possible to argue, though it might require an unusual logic, that each representative could and must speak and act, not for the local community that chose him, but for all the people of the realm. Sir Edward Coke, who was good at this kind of logic, may have been the first to state the idea in so many words. “Though one be chosen for one particular County or Borough,” he said, “yet when he is returned and set in Parliament, he serveth for the whole Realm, for the end of his coming thither, as in the writ of his election appeareth, is generall.” From the fiction that one man may stand in the place of a whole community and bind that community by his actions, Coke had extrapolated the more extended fiction that one man may stand for the entire people of a country, most of whom have had no hand in designating him for that purpose. The classic statement of this notion was to come in the next century, when Edmund Burke explained to the electors of Bristol why he owed them nothing but the courtesy of listening to their wishes before acting as he thought best for the whole country. But already in Coke's formulation we are very close to the point where representation becomes representative government. At the time when Coke wrote, whatever authority representatives could claim over other subjects presumably came from the king. But it was only a short step from representing the whole people to deriving authority from them.

When Englishmen took that step in the 1640s, they did not affirm the sovereignty of each county or borough. It did not even occur to them to think that way. They were replacing the authority of the king, and the king had been ruler of all England. It was not a question of particular counties or boroughs declaring their independence from his rule any more than it was particular towns or counties in his American colonies that declared independence in 1776. There would have been no logical barrier to thinking of the people of every village as a sovereign body, but that is not what happened. The people whose sovereignty was proclaimed were the whole people of the country or colony, far too numerous a group to deliberate or act as a body. It was their representatives who claimed for them the authority that only a representative body could exercise. The sovereignty of the people was not said to reside in the particular constituencies that chose the representatives, it resided in the people at large and reached the representatives without the people at large doing anything to confer it. Again, there would have been no logical barrier to having the people confer authority by a nationwide election at large of any number of men to serve as rulers, but that is not what happened. What happened is that representatives elected by particular counties and towns assumed powers of government over a whole country and claimed that their powers came from the sovereign people as a whole.

It would perhaps not be too much to say that representatives invented the sovereignty of the people in order to claim it for themselves, in order to justify not the resistance of their constituents but their
own
resistance to a formerly sovereign king. The sovereignty of the people was an instrument by which representatives raised themselves to the maximum distance above the particular set of people who chose them. In the name of the people they became all-powerful in government, shedding as much as possible the local, subject character that made them representatives.

As much as possible. The English Revolution actually went awry when the Long Parliament (1640–49) became too long, when the representatives declined to return to their constituents for reelection or rejection. The representative's national authority cannot be magnified to the point of eliminating his identity as a local subject without at the same time destroying the fiction of representation and putting an end to representative government. The conflict cannot be eliminated; it has to be muted and contained. One element may be emphasized over the other at different times and places, and the history of representative government may be read as a dialectical process in which one element rises or falls at the expense of the other. But if either is wholly missing, representative government either ceases to be government or ceases to be representative. When the local, subject character of the representative is emphasized too much, it becomes difficult to perceive him as a proper repository of the national authority with which the sovereign people have supposedly invested him. When his national function as ruler of the whole people is emphasized, he may lose credibility as the spokesman of other subjects in his local community. The fiction of representation has to sustain a continual strain from opposite directions.

The dimensions of the conflict have not always been apparent even to those engaged in it, but we may perceive it in operation at an early stage in the English republican theorist Algernon Sidney's explanation of the representative's national authority. “It is not,” Sidney argued in the early 1680s,