The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (30 page)

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That these responses were products of emotion as well as of mind should not lead us to dismiss them as irrational. Reason inspired them just as passion did. On one level, the colonists estimated quite rationally what the stamp taxes would cost economically as well as politically. Because the taxes would have to be paid in sterling, it seemed that hard money would disappear from the colonies already chronically short of coin. As for who would bear the heaviest burden, even so stalwart a conservative as Jared Ingersoll wrote the ministry that the poor would feel the taxes most heavily. Small claims before justices of the peace would be taxed, for example -- cases ordinarily brought only by poor men.
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To be sure, the political meaning of the stamp taxes preoccupied the colonists even more. The ministry might cite all the precedents it liked, from the Post Office Act of 1711 to the recently enacted duties on molasses, but it seemed obvious to the colonists that something new, in actuality something unprecedented, had been done. At any rate, the colonists looked at the Stamp Act in a context rather different from that assumed by the ministry. The Stamp Act followed other actions and official statements which indicated that from now on life in America would be different, especially as it pertained to governance and getting and spending. The Sugar Act had let the colonists know of official displeasure at the conduct of juries in cases involving seaborne commerce. So out with trial-by-jury and in with vice admiralty courts unencumbered by juries. Concern for ancient liberties at this substitution seems understandable -- and reasonable.

One can also see rationality in the disquiet expressed at the explanation given for the new policies: reduction of the English national debt and the defense of the colonies. Perhaps selfishness and a notorious propensity to starve public bodies account for the lack of sympathy for English taxpayers, but the concern over regular troops stationed in America hardly arose from merely a mean spirit. A standing army in time of peace, after all, had helped occasion the Glorious Revolution. For their part, the colonists professed not to understand why such an army was needed in America after the French had been driven out of Canada, unless to be used to force them to yield to such oppressions as unconstitutional taxes. Considering all these matters together -- taxes, governance, and security -- concern and even suspicion seemed eminently rational to the colonists, and one can agree that the discontent they felt on these scores seems so -- on its face.

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If this discontent was explicable by rational calculation and expressed itself as anger, even rage, against English public policy and in particular the Stamp Act, there must have been still another kind of discontent that vented itself in this crisis. This discontent may justly be termed nonrational, for its ultimate sources had nothing to do with public affairs. No doubt every society generates a certain amount of frustration, tension, and anxiety in its members. Some may be neurotic, some not; some may find outlet in personal relations, some is contained or directed at the self; and at least occasionally some seeks discharge in a political or a social movement. The varieties and sources of individual discontents must often seem endless and were surely diverse in the colonies. The present state of knowledge of the psychology of Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century will not reveal with certainty why this sort of discontent -- or aggression -- focused against public authorities in England and America. There are clues, however, in the controversies over the Stamp Act about the connections between private rage and public behavior. For one thing, the movement in opposition to English policy commanded not only the support of most leaders in society, but also their talents and resources. The leading supporters of the Stamp Act, on the other hand, besides feeling divided within themselves, had already incurred suspicion and hostility on other grounds -- Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts, for example, and the Tory Junto in Rhode Island.
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In 1765 the privately engendered anger of a son against his father, a husband against his wife, a worker against his employer, still encountered the usual powerful constraints inhibiting its release, but might find a socially approved target in English public policy. The traditional prohibitions against the discharge of discontent against public authority had been suspended. The new focus undoubtedly freed a good deal of aggression which otherwise would have had to find other channels.

Whether "rational" or "nonrational," the discontent expressed in this crisis was so explosive that had the Stamp Act not been repealed five months after taking effect, it might have produced revolution in 1766. The pervasiveness and the intensity of the conviction in the colonies that a conspiracy had placed liberty on a precarious footing explains in part the American response. Yet the Americans' political sensitivities and their almost instinctive willingness to explain their crisis in terms of dark plots and sinister conspiracies require further explanation.
They

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may have been brought to the edge of revolution by their conviction that they were the victims of an evil conspiracy, but what made them believe in the conspiracy, a conspiracy that had no basis in fact?

Two sorts of circumstances conditioned these responses. The first was political; the second, religious or, more accurately, moral. For at least two generations politically aware Americans had been a suspicious lot, smelling plots and conspiracies in all sorts of circles, including those surrounding governors and royal officials serving in the colonies. Of course their politics gave them reason for entertaining suspicions; their politics bred a turbulent factionalism and an atmosphere, if not always the actuality, of conspiracy. The "outs" plotted to replace the "ins" who conspired to remain where they were. In fact, colonial politics possessed so much fluidity, with interest groups forming to achieve short-term objectives, then dissolving, only to coalesce once more in different alignments in the service of another set of temporary purposes, that no group maintained its hold on the government for long.
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This instability persisted in spite of conditions which would in time contribute to a remarkably durable political order. By eighteenth-century standards almost all the thirteen colonies were ruled by governments that included strong popular, if not democratic, elements. With land ownership widely spread, the typical American male was an independent yeoman and a voter because the franchise was tied to the land. Representation, though not always well apportioned, was by the standards of the time responsible, especially in the lower houses of the legislatures. Since society was relatively simple, representatives tended to have interests in common with the voters; and constituencies often instructed their representatives. And institutions outside governments which in Europe still retained political authority had largely lost it in America -for example, the established churches could no longer persecute dissenters.

Yet despite these circumstances, instability proved a chronic condition and often appeared in a sinister guise. For it involved outside -- royal or proprietary -- authority in the person of the governor who was everywhere out of reach of popular control except in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The governors seemed to hold, and in fact legally did hold, power to deprive the colonies of their liberties. Governors, as agents of an English ministry, could legally convene and prorogue and dissolve the legislatures; they could veto legislation; they could create courts, appoint

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and remove judges, or routinely insisted that they had these powers. The Crown had lost all these powers in England in the Revolution of 1688, but in the colonies populated by English subjects they survived in law, apparently a legacy of a persistent tyranny. In the realities of colonial politics, despite these legal or constitutional powers, the governor lacked the "influence" -- the control of patronage -- that gave ministerial authority its substance. This disparity between formal constitutional structure and the reality of politics contributed to the instability and the atmosphere of conspiracy, with the governor playing a part in the incessant combining and fragmentation of factions, and with his authority, shadowy and mysterious as it was, often in dispute.
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In this environment conventional wisdom came to hold that plots and conspiracy always ruled political action. This had not been an original discovery of the colonists. At least fifty years before the American Revolution they had in fact begun to absorb the ideas and assumptions of the radical opposition in England, the so-called eighteenth-century commonwealthmen. The name was derived from the radicals of the previous century, the Roundheads, the makers of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth. The seventeenth-century writers of this ideological bent included John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney, among others. Their political ideas received something of a revision in the exclusion crisis of 1679-81 -- the attempt to bar James II from the throne -- and eighteenth-century radicals continued the process, adapting the older ideology in order to make it useful in the opposition to ministerial governments.
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The eighteenth-century commonwealthmen have not survived as great names -- John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Winchester, were the most important -- but in the fashioning of revolutionary ideology in America they had an influence that surpassed Locke's. To be sure, they drew upon Locke and others more original than themselves. Indeed, their ideas were not original, and the heart of their political theory resembled closely the great Whig consensus of the century. They praised the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and they attributed English liberty to it; and like Locke they postulated a state of nature from which rights arose which the civil polity, created by mutual consent, guaranteed; they argued that a contract formed government and that sovereignty resided in the people.
These ideas were

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so widely shared in England as to be conventional, but the eighteenthcentury radicals put them to unconventional uses. These radicals rarely got into Parliament -- and never in numbers -- but they formed an opposition to a succession of ministries and to the complacency of the age. While Whigs and English governments sang the praises of English institutions, English history, and English liberty, the radicals chanted hymns of mourning, dirges for the departing liberty of England and the rising corruption in English politics and society. Within all states, from ancient Rome to the present, they argued, there had been attempts to enslave the people. The history of politics was nothing other than the history of the struggle between power and liberty. Trenchard and Gordon called one of
Cato's Letters: Essays on Liberty
( 1721) "Cautions against the Natural Encroachments of Power"; in that essay they declared that "it is natural for Power to be striveing to enlarge itself, and to be encroaching upon those that have none."
Cato's Letters
likens power to fire -- "it warms, scorches, or destroys, according as it is watched, provoked, or increased. It is as dangerous as it is useful . . . it is apt to break its bounds." There was in the radical ideology a profound distrust of power, then, power as force, as coercion, as aggression. What did power coerce or encroach upon? Liberty, usually defined as the use and enjoyment of one's natural rights within the limits of law made in civil society.
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