25. America Polarizes

English Whigs and radicals put up a gallant fight in Parliament in early 1776 against the hiring of mercenaries, but to no avail; as a result, sentiment in America for independence increased greatly. To the Americans the hiring of the German mercenaries—generally called “Hessians”—was proof that Britain would treat them as aliens and foreigners.

From observing British reactions, General Lee and the other radical leaders in the Continental Army had already been convinced of the necessity of independence. Lee began to pepper congressmen with urgings of greater militancy. In early October 1775 he wrote to the receptive John Adams: “Now is the time to show your firmness. If the least timidity is displayed we are all ruined.... You ought to begin by confiscating... the estates of all the notorious enemies to American liberty.... Afterward you should invite all the maritime powers of the world into your ports.” Thus he gave the call for open ports and the confiscation of Tory property, which, before long, became the key planks in the radical platform. In another letter, he put his finger on the main stumbling-block to American independence: despite the general willingness to denounce Parliament or the royal advisors, Americans had been reluctant to break with the symbol of the king himself. Now he could write that people “begin to suspect that the king is as bad as the worst of his ministry. To have advanced such a proposition last year would have been thought treason and impiety. Next year [he added prophetically]—if you will have patience—king and tyrant will be a synonymous term.”

Similarly, Gen. John Sullivan of New Hampshire asked why Congress did not have the courage to declare independence. Did they believe that such a declaration would lead the British to “throw their shot and shells with more force than at present?” Sullivan insistently urged John Adams “to destroy that spirit of moderation which... if not speedily rooted out, will prove the final overthrow of America.” General Nathanael Greene wrote to a receptive fellow Rhode Islander, delegate Samuel Ward, on behalf of independence. And Gen. Horatio Gates was preaching independence so openly and enthusiastically as to astonish even Charles Lee.

Despite the fact that the inner logic of the accelerating conflict called for American independence, Congress was by no means ready to take such a radical step. Congressional foot-draging on the subject was in a large sense a function of opinions on independence in the respective colonies, for Congress itself was a creature of the individual provinces; even if it wanted to, it could not declare American independence unless the respective provinces desired to do so. Each of the provinces, it is true, had rapidly and spontaneously developed a network of revolutionary bodies which took over the functions of local and provincial government. In each case the royal executive and the royal governor had been quickly swept away so that only three royal governors remained in their provinces by the spring of 1776, and these had no political power whatsoever. By far the most dangerous of the three, William Franklin of New Jersey, was placed under house arrest in March 1776 and shipped to a Connecticut prison. The popular and quiescent Robert Eden of Maryland was shipped home during the same month, and John Penn, of Pennsylvania and Delaware, the last proprietary governor in the colonies, was sympathetic to the rebel cause and remained in Pennsylvania as a private citizen.

In each province, the colonial assembly, which was part of the old royal structure, was abandoned, replaced by elected provincial congresses, or conventions. These provincial legislatures retained the supreme legislative power of the colonial assembly as well as the supreme judicial power that had belonged to the assembly and to the executive. Of particular importance was the automatic liquidation during this process of the old bureaucratic executive that had been removed from all popular or democratic check. Replacing this ruling oligarchy were the legislatures themselves, which now appointed their own committees of safety, or “councils of safety,” which were totally subordinated to the elected legislatures. Philosophically, after all, the executive function is merely that of a hired hand to enforce the laws, so total subordination of the executive to the legislative power seemed the rational course. This conclusion was redoubled by the threat of oligarchic rule, cut off from direct popular check, a threat inherent in any independent executive power.

The separation of the executive and the legislature in England and other countries of the day was not the result of a competing philosophical view of government, but of the history of these institutions. The executive power had been vested as a result of previous conquests in the oligarchic rule of a monarch and his aides, a rule which the monarch always strove to be as absolute and unchecked as the “traffic” could bear. In Great Britain, Parliament became the legislature as a result of an effort by part of the public to exercise a checkrein upon the king. Contrary to mythmakers on the English constitution, the democratic wing of royal government was not the embodiment of reasoned philosophic principle, of “checks and balances” or “separation of powers”; the democratic wing established itself in a pragmatic struggle to limit the power of the royal government. Originally, democracy was not so much a means of governmental rule as it was a means for the popular checking of government. Parliament did not begin as a way to rule; it began as a means of telling the king that if he did not redress grievances and lower his exactions and demands, the representatives of the public would not consent to paying taxes to the crown. Democracy, in short, originated as a libertarian weapon against the State rather than as itself a form of state. Later it became a form of government, but the former function still prevailed in eighteenth century England, for even though Parliament shared part of the governmental rule, it also tried at times to check its old nemesis, the crown.

In the eighteenth century, however, it was America that had taken over the original libertarian role of democratic representation once played by the early institution of Parliament. The main function of the colonial assemblies was to check as much as possible the power of the royal bureaucracy. The assemblies were the arm of the public that combatted and kept vigilance over the growth of royal executive power. One effective means to this end was keeping control of executive salaries firmly and day to day in an assembly’s hands. Then when royal government was swept away, the spontaneous local and provincial revolutionary bodies, freely and frequently elected and thereby subject to popular check, took over governmental functions, deposing the old oligarchy. As was true of so many aspects of the American Revolution, this was truly a revolutionary act for liberty and democracy, and at one unspectacular stroke it profoundly changed American political institutions. Not only was royal rule liquidated, but so too for the time being was the bureaucratic oligarchy.

Not only was the executive oligarchy swept away by the act of revolution, but so too were the councils, the royally appointed upper houses of the legislatures which had also served as executive aids to the royal governors. The representative part of the legislature automatically came to the fore as provincial congresses or assemblies, and equally naturally as unicameral legislative bodies. The glorification of separation of powers and bicameral legislatures by such Tory-minded theorists as Montesquieu was a method of keeping democracy in severely narrow bounds and preserving the dominance of arbitrary oligarchic rule.

In recent years, neoconservative writers have sharply contrasted liberty and democracy, and have loudly protested any identification between them. Their case rests on two broad grounds: philosophically, because liberty refers to what government should do, while democracy refers to who should rule in the government; and empirically, because the main threat to liberty has allegedly been “totalitarian democracy.” But historically, for the late eighteenth and for earlier centuries (waiving later centuries at this point) democracy and liberty were conjoined; democracy was precisely the major instrument by which the libertarian revolution exerted pressure upon the tyranny of the ruling castes. The threat—or rather the reality—of continuing invasion of liberty came from the state apparatus and its privileged ruling castes. The popular democratic upsurge against this prevailing “old order” was the concrete form necessarily taken by the libertarian idea; the preeminent libertarian task was to end the dictation to and exploitation of the people by the rulers of the State apparati. In England, as everywhere, the State began in conquest, and a democratic upsurge was the clearly indicated path by which the people could pursue libertarian goals.

In addition to these historical reasons for democracy and liberty to go hand in hand, there is the further philosophic point that any direct popular thrust for tyranny is bound to be fleeting and episodic. Even as ugly a happening as the democratic lynch-mob is necessarily erratic and shortlived. For one thing, the mass of the people generally have neither the time nor the interest to engage in continuing organized expressions of power or plunder. The average man is too busy at the tasks of everyday life to be even concerned about, much less active in, such matters. Hence the much deplored phenomenon of political “apathy.” Only in revolutions does such mass interest in political affairs arise, and this is one of the main reasons why revolutions—disturbing as they are to regular routine —are so difficult to launch. Threats to liberty, therefore, will tend to come not from the formless and remote masses, but from “professionals,” people directly and fully concerned day in and day out in political affairs— from an oligarchy, either government bureaucrats or those who can persuade or manipulate those bureaucrats to grant them special privilege and pelf, the “ruling classes.”

The natural though not perfectly invariant conjunction of liberty and democracy was well understood by the radical wing—the “Left”—of the American revolutionaries, and hence their continuing concern to maintain governmental forms as close to popular democracy as possible. Hence too their constant vigilance against any recrudescence of executive oligarchy after the royal forms were swept away at the beginning of the Revolution.

Each American province, then, quickly found itself after Lexington and Concord with a new revolutionary governmental structure, consisting of a provincial unicameral legislature and town and county governments and committees of safety. To adopt a formal constitutional frame would be an important step toward proclaimed independence.

As spontaneous creatures of local committees of rebels, the new revolutionary assemblies were remarkably democratic in the sense of participation by the great bulk of the non-Tory population. Every one of the thirteen colonies had had freehold (landed) or personal property qualifications for voting in provincial and town elections, although five colonies allowed a minimum of personal property as an alternative, and in New York and Virginia long-term tenants were included as freeholders. Historians formerly believed that this colonial suffrage was severely undemocratic, disenfranchising most of the adult male population. Recent researches reveal the fallacy of this gloomy view, indicating that the average proportion of eligible adult males in the colonies ranged from 50 to 75 percent.* It should be recognized, however, that this situation was far from idyllic, and that one-quarter to one-half of white adult males of the American colonies were disfranchised; including the slaves drags down the percentage of eligible voters still further, and even the few free Negroes were barred from voting in the four southern colonies. At the end of the colonial period, eligible voters constituted 90 percent of adult white males in New Hampshire (higher in local town elections); approximately 75–80 percent in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut; over 80 percent in North and South Carolina; and generally over 70 percent in Georgia. In contrast to these high percentages, eligibility in New York and New Jersey ranged from 50 to 75 percent. In the lowest strata were Virginia, whose eligibility was approximately 50 percent, and Pennsylvania and Maryland, where it ranged from 35 to over 50 percent.

* For the most balanced and judicious presentation of this suffrage revisionism see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), chapters 1–6.