CHAPTER II.

THE ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH MILITARY GOVERNMENT IN

AMERICA.

It was of inestimable advantage to the people of America that the Revolution came at a time when the religious enfranchisement of the Anglo-Saxon race was quite complete. The next process in the evolution of popular rights was political. A people absorbed in the work of defining a new phase of civilization are not always fully conscious of what they are doing. The leaders of public opinion from 1760 until the actual close of hostilities in 1783, whether Loyalists or Patriots, could not accurately fathom the meaning of the radical changes through which the country was passing. The time for a political reorganization had come. Acts of Parliament, strictly legal and constitutional, as the English law and constitution were authoritatively interpreted at the time, became the ostensible excuse for American independence. The concrete expression of the reform came later, in the extension of the franchise and the broadening of the basis of representation; but in the revision and new definition of the state by Adams, Jefferson and their associates, the individual was recognized as the center of the political system. The most liberal political writers of the eighteenth century in England, France and America rested, on the individual, the greater part of the weight of whatever system they advocated. Individualism was the chief corner-stone of their politics. It was as they affected the individual that the rights of jury trial, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience were construed.

The American Revolution differed from all preceding

DEMOCRACY VS. ABSOLUTISM.

43

revolutions in the history of the world in its enthronement of the individual and its subordination of the state to him. For a proper understanding of the character of the American constitutions of government, this idea cannot be too well mastered. The course of democracy in the nineteenth century not infrequently proved that this enthronement was not without grave dangers nor without some evil consequences: the destructive effects of a too radical devotion to the individualistic theory of the state. Toward the close of the nineteenth century some popular recognition of this danger became apparent, as disclosed in the centralization of national power and in the paternalism of state governments. The modern state became patriarchal after it had been conceived to exist merely as a legal entity, created and organized solely for the protection of the individual. In the eighteenth century, and at the time of the organization of our State governments, the whole lost much for the benefit of the parts. Society was then in danger of suffering for the benefit of the citizen. The danger then, and it has been since realized, was that the function of the aggregate people might become subordinated to the will of aggressive individuals, or to yet more aggressive groups of individuals, corporations. The altruism of the revolutionary period might be sacrificed to a later egoism and the equal opportunity of all be lost in the monopolism of the few. Democracy itself becomes absolutism when the individual is the state.

The individualism which so characterized political thought in America at the time of the Revolution figured then as socialism; for it expressed approximately the more or less common sentiment of the acting and controlling part of the population. Had American economic interests been greatly diversified then, there would have been no revolution. The very uniformity of life in the

44

ULTIMATE CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION.

country in 1776 made uniformity of sentiment possible. As the population was almost wholly engaged in agriculture, sentiments appealing to the agricultural class would ultimately prevail, if they were expressed as the demands of a political party, and particularly if this party should succeed in establishing itself in the country by means of an elaborate and efficient political machinery. The Loyalists did not, because they could not, organize, like the Patriots. They could not control the country. The old theory of government did not provide for the innovations which the Patriots demanded. The political problem before them was to give the new doctrines a constitutional habitation and a name, so that in the opinion of the majority, the new procedure should have the authority of reason, of morality and of a more perfect law.

It does not appear that the American leaders awakened any enthusiastic support for their ideas, on economic grounds. "The ultimate cause of the Revolution," says Mr. Lecky, "may be mainly traced to the great influence which the commercial classes possessed in British legislation. The expulsion of the French made it possible for the Americans to dispense with English productions. The commercial restrictions alone made it to their interest to do so. If the 'Wealth of Nations' had been published a century earlier, and if its principles had passed into legislation, it is quite possible that the separation of England and her colonies might have been indefinitely adjourned. A false theory of commerce, then universally accepted, had involved both the mother country and her colonies in a net of restrictions which greatly retarded their development and had proved a perpetual subject of irritation and dissension." The economic weakness of this

1 England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. III, 328.

commercial system rendered it incapable of resisting the impassioned attack of the Americans. It was this weakness which opened up a way for independence. Yet, we would not now consider the form of the attack as strictly economic. The Americans were aroused by impassioned appeals to the sense of their political rights. The leaders knew that the masses would not understand an economic argument; therefore the appeal must be put in a more familiar, if not in a more pleasing form.

A century earlier it would have been religious; but it was now made political. The appeal, in whatever form, lacked only a constitutional basis and this was supplied by the theory that the political rights of all men are natural, and therefore, that the Americans were entitled to define their political principles to suit themselves. But all appeals were ultimately to the individual, and, in this respect, were peculiarly adapted to America, because it was there that the conditions of life emphasized his importance. As yet he was not lost in the mass of a diversified and heterogeneous population. He still met the difficulties in field and forest, face to face. There, literally, he made his own way. He defended his family against famine, pestilence and death; he was almost alone with nature. Individualism there was accented as it had not been accented in Europe since the time, in that remote past, when the people of Asia first overran its great western peninsula. England admitted that reforms were needed at home and the Whig party stood for reform, but these reforms were such as only an old society needed, and to attempt to administer a Whig reform policy in America was sure to fall short of American demands.

Even in their own interpretation of the reforms needed, the American people divided into parties, and, in the struggle which ensued, the administration of government

46

THE TOWN-MEETING.

itself became a new element in the revised definition of the state. There was much that was old in the process going on, for the reform was one of civil evolution on a large scale. The revision of the theory of the state began with an attempt to nullify an act of Parliament, and was successful, for years, through following illicit trade. It was now to go on with almost equal success in the opposition to the parliamentary claim of the right to tax the country. Nullification was to strengthen into secession, and secession was to become independence. To this process two elements in the country powerfully contributed, and were exemplified in the New England town-meeting and in the debating clubs of the country. From the beginning of government in New England, its inhabitants had been accustomed to assemble regularly in town-meeting for the discussion of public affairs. The town-meeting thus became a political school, in which every elector received instruction. Early accustomed to governing themselves, the people, in their town-meetings, not only carried out the customary administration of local government, but occasionally enlarged the field of their discourse and discussed the principles on which government rests. When the loss of their charter was threatened, the people of Massachusetts assembled with renewed zeal in their townmeetings and discussed more accurately than ever the principle on which they understood their political rights were based.

So, too, the attack on the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut called forth a similar activity, and thus the town-meeting became the instrument at hand for determining what course public opinion should take. It easily responded to the influence of master minds, and local policies as well as local candidates were here agreed on, though sometimes at an earlier meeting of the leaders